On February 22, the founder of the NFT trading platform Blur disclosed his identity and had studied in the Computer Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In addition to NFT trading platforms, graduates and professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have a place in multiple Web3 and Crypto tracks such as public chains, exchanges, VC, media, and Layer2.
01
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler
Gary Gensler served as Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from 2009 to 2014. He began teaching at MIT in 2018 and is a professor of practice in global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Courses for blockchain and currency. He is also a senior advisor to the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative.
In 2018, Gary Gensler introduced blockchain technology at MIT
On April 17, 2021, Gary Gensler was sworn in as Chairman of the SEC.
As the most knowledgeable SEC chairman in history, Gary Gensler has taken office with high hopes from cryptocurrency insiders. It is speculated that the Bitcoin ETF that has been postponed will be passed soon, and the lengthy lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple will soon be settled. Finished.
Unfortunately, the above expectations seem to have been dashed so far.
Gary Gensler’s view on cryptocurrencies is: BTC is a commodity and should be regulated by the CFTC. Most remaining crypto assets are securities, crypto exchanges are stock exchanges, and both issuers and exchanges are obliged to register with the SEC. This makes the SEC's legal basis for regulating cryptocurrencies to follow the securities law, but there is currently no precise definition of which cryptocurrencies are securities.
How effective is Gary Gensler’s regulation of cryptocurrencies?
During Gary Gensler's tenure, many events occurred, including the Luna storm, the bankruptcy of Three Arrows Capital, the bankruptcy of lending platforms such as Celsius and Voyager, and the bankruptcy of FTX. These events caused unprecedented harm to investors.
Gary Gensler's work has also attracted dissatisfaction from some people. For example, U.S. Congressman Tom Emmer accused Gary Gensler of collecting encryption company information casually and unfocused, and refused to provide Congress with requested information, causing Congress to miss events such as Terra and FTX. investigation.
On February 10, the SEC ordered the crypto exchange Kraken to "immediately" end the encryption pledge-as-a-service provided to U.S. customers and pay a $30 million fine to the SEC. Prior to this, the SEC had ordered the crypto lending platform Nexo to stop providing financial services to all U.S. customers (including citizens and residents).
Gary Gensler explains: Cryptocurrency intermediaries are required to provide appropriate disclosures and protections required by securities laws when offering investment contracts in exchange for investors’ tokens, whether through staking-as-a-service, lending or other means.
This explanation is unsatisfactory. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said that the SEC’s punishment of Kraken is a “lazy” regulatory approach and that staking guidelines should be introduced to guide registration. Nansen founder Alex Svanevik said it would be easy for the exchange to be transparent about its ETH staking without “help” from the SEC.
On February 13, the SEC issued a notice to the encryption company Paxos, stating that the digital asset Binance USD (BUSD) issued and listed by Paxos was an unregistered security that violated investor protection laws, and the SEC planned to prosecute the company.
The SEC’s regulatory approach has angered cryptocurrency bosses. Messari founder Ryan Selkis said that smart regulation is important and that de facto bans will be ruthlessly attacked. We will spend every ounce of energy and political capital fighting the enemies of cryptocurrencies.
02
FTX founder: SBF
Full name Sam Bankman-Fried, studied physics at MIT from 2010 to 2014.
After graduating from MIT with a major in physics, SBF worked for 3 years at Jane Street, a quantitative trading company on Wall Street. He founded Alameda Research in 2017 in a rented house in Berkeley, California. In May 2019, FTX, an exchange focusing on the derivatives trading market, was established in Hong Kong.
FTX’s success is inseparable from the right time, right place and right people.
Tianshi: At the end of the year after FTX was established, the COVID-19 epidemic broke out around the world. In March 2020, the spread of the epidemic caused the financial market to collapse, and the Federal Reserve opened the floodgates. In the following two years, the total amount of money printed in the United States was almost the same as in the past 40 years. Under the flood, the encryption market ushered in a violent bull market, and FTX soared into the sky.
Geographical advantage: After the “94” regulation in 2017, mainland China completely banned entities operating virtual currencies. Singapore and Hong Kong have become hubs for cryptocurrency players.
Renhe: FTX’s narrative and the image of white Wall Street elites created by SBF are very popular among elites, including BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund, Canada’s third largest pension fund, and Singapore’s state-owned investment institution Temasek, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Tiger Global Management, Multicoin, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures and other institutions have raised more than US$3.2 billion in financing, with a valuation reaching US$32 billion, making it the fastest growing cryptocurrency company in history.
However, among all the "people and relationships", the relationship between SBF and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has been affecting the nerves of those who take advantage of FTX since its bankruptcy. To put it simply, SBF and Gary Gensler are both from MIT. One graduated from MIT and the other taught at MIT. Caroline is the CEO of Alameda, another company of SBF. Her father, Glenn Ellison, is a professor and director of the MIT School of Economics, and was also Gary Gensler's direct supervisor during his time at MIT.
After FTX went bankrupt, thousands of people petitioned the U.S. Congress to investigate the relationship between Gary Gensler and FTX founder SBF. Gensler met with SBF before FTX went bankrupt. The whistleblower claimed that Gensler may have helped SBF and FTX obtain regulatory monopolies through legal loopholes.
03
Blur founder: Pacman (Tieshun)
Pacman is the pseudonym of Tieshun Roquerre.
From 2016 to 2018, Pacman majored in mathematics and computer science at MIT.
In 2022, Pacman anonymously founded the NFT trading platform Blur. In March 2022, Blur completed a $11 million seed round of financing, led by Paradigm.
Before the emergence of Blur, Opensea's absolute dominance of the NFT trading market was unshakable. Although x2y2 and LooksRare attempted to stage Sushiswap’s “vampire attack” on Uniswap by issuing coins, they both failed.
On October 20, 2022, Blur was officially launched. According to data from Dune Analytics, Blur's weekly trading has surpassed Opensea's on October 31. Prior to this, no trading platform's weekly trading volume had reached 1/2 of Opensea's. On February 22, Blur's daily trading volume was US$115 million, while Opensea's was less than US$15 million.
Pacman's ability to execute is astonishing, and he transformed himself and Blur from nothing to heroes in just 3 months.
However, just like the “DeFi magic mines” that emerged after the previous DeFi summer and relied on token rewards, what will happen when Blur’s token rewards are reduced or exhausted? This analysis by Delphi Digital researcher Teng Yan is worth reading.
04
Optimism founder: Jinglan Wang
Jinglan Wang is currently the only female founder behind a project worth tens of billions of dollars in the Web3 field.
Jinglan Wang moderates conversation at San Francisco Blockchain Week 2018
The MIT Bitcoin Club was the starting point for Jinglan Wang’s career in cryptocurrency.
Jinglan Wang served as the chairman of the Wellesley (Wellesley College) Bitcoin Club and the director of the MIT Bitcoin Expo.
Jinglan Wang is so obsessed with cryptocurrencies that she even changed her major in college to study computer science just to better understand cryptocurrencies.
From March 2017 to August 2018, Jinglan Wang served as the executive director of the Blockchain Education Network (BEN), which was founded in 2014 by crypto tycoon Jeremy Gardner in conjunction with Bitcoin clubs in colleges and universities across the United States to focus on the area. A non-profit organization for blockchain education.
Jinglan Wang has been researching the scalability of Ethereum since 2015.
In 2019, Jinglan Wang founded the non-profit research organization Plasma Group with Benjamin Jones, Karl Floersch and Kevin Ho. Plasma is a second-layer extension technology for Ethereum, proposed by Vitalik and Joseph Poon in 2017.
In January 2020, Plasma Group announced its transformation from a research collective into a for-profit startup called Optimism, backed by $3.5 million from Paradigm and IDEO CoLab Ventures.
This shift toward for-profit startups was initially met with skepticism by outsiders, such as Dragonfly Capital partner Ashwin Ramachandran, who described the shift as the "death of Plasma."
In March 2022, Optimism completed US$150 million in financing and was valued at US$1.65 billion. Becoming a crypto unicorn in 2 years. On June 1 of the same year, Optimism officially launched its governance token OP and launched an airdrop, which aroused the excitement of the entire crypto industry.
Just yesterday, Coinbase built a new L2 blockchain Base based on OP Stack. The Optimism token OP bucked the trend and soared, with a full circulation market value of more than 10 billion US dollars.
05
Paradigm founder Matt Huang
Matt Huang studied mathematics at MIT from 2006 to 2010.
Matt Huang is best known for investing in Toutiao (later renamed Bytedance) founded by Zhang Yiming at the age of 24. According to an article in the public account "Ranfanshu" in 2019, the return on Huang Gongyu's investment was about 2,000 times, and ByteDance was valued at about US$75 billion at the time.
In June 2018, after leaving Sequoia Capital, Matt Huang co-founded crypto venture Paradigm with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam.
Matt Huang (right) and Fred Ehrsam
Since its establishment, Paradigm has become the leading project in almost all subdivided tracks in the Web3 field. Including Blur, the NFT trading platform with the largest trading volume today, uniswap, the largest DEX, Optimism, the Layer 2 network with the highest market value, etc. Of course, there are times when things go wrong, such as investing in FTX.
Compared with successful investment cases, the most impressive thing about Paradigm is its ability to quickly put its research capabilities into practice and lead industry trends.
For example, in the NFT artwork Art Gobblers that became popular in November last year, the green paper was written by Paradigm researchers and adopted the Goo token distribution mechanism proposed by Paradigm in September 2022. In May 2021, Paradigm proposed the concept of “perpetual options”. Since then, Opyn’s research team launched a perpetual cooperation option product.
06
Lightspark founder: Christian Catalini
From 2014 to 2021, Christian Catalini served as an assistant professor and associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and is the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Laboratory.
From 2018 to 2022, Christian Catalini serves as the co-founder of Diem/Libra and the chief economist of Meta FinTech.
A small story also occurred during the period. An MIT researcher accused Facebook of plagiarizing the results of a paper it published in July 2018 on the design of Libra.
In February 2022, Diem was sold for about US$200 million, and Meta's cryptocurrency dream was shattered.
In May 2022, he served as co-founder and chief strategy officer of Lightspark.
In addition, he currently serves part-time as an economic advisor for Algorand, a technical advisor for Chainlink Labs, and an advisory board member for Coinbase Research Institute.
07
Messari founder Ryan Selkis
Ryan Selkis attended the MIT Sloan School of Management from 2013-2014 and received an MBA.
Messari was founded by Ryan Selkis in January 2018 to build research tools for crypto businesses and professionals.
In September 2022, Messari received US$35 million, valuing it at US$300 million.
08
MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor
Michael Saylor studied aerospace engineering at MIT from 1983 to 1987, and founded the business intelligence company MicroStrategy after graduation. In 1998, MicroStrategy went public on Nasdaq.
In July 2020, MicroStrategy made its first purchase of Bitcoin. According to coinglass data, MicroStrategy currently holds 129,600 BTC, making it the listed company holding the most BTC.
Tesla follows closely behind. Tesla’s purchase of Bitcoin also has something to do with Michael Saylor. In December 2020, Musk asked on Twitter about the feasibility of buying Bitcoin in large quantities. Michael Saylor suggests Tesla convert its balance sheet from USD to BTC.
In February 2021, Tesla submitted an announcement to the SEC that Tesla had purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin.
09
StarkWare Co-Founder and CEO Uri Kolodny
Uri Kolodny studied MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management from 1998-2000.
From November 2017 to present, Uri Kolodny serves as co-founder and CEO of StarkWare.
In May 2022, Starkware announced a financing of US$100 million with a valuation of US$8 billion. Investors include institutions such as Paradigm, Sequoia Capital and Pantera Capital, as well as Vitalik.
10
Celo founder Rene Reinsberg
Rene Reinsberg studied MBA at MIT from 2009-2011 and is the founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center.
From 2020 to present, Rene Reinsberg serves as Chairman of Celo Foundation.
11
Li Qiwei, founder of Litecoin
In 1999, Qiwei Li graduated from MIT.
In 2011, Li Qiwei modified the Bitcoin code and created Litecoin.
The crypto world will never lack the pursuit of memes. Under the marketing slogan of "Bit Gold, Lite Silver", Litecoin has gained a firm foothold in the crypto world. While thousands of altcoins that emerged during the same period faded away in subsequent waves, Litecoin miraculously weathered every dip.
In 2018, Li Qiwei liquidated his Litecoin position at the high price of Litecoin and donated part of the funds to the Litecoin Foundation and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative.
12
Algorand founder Silvio Micali
From 1983 to present, Silvio Micali serves as a professor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
In 2012, Silvio Micali and Berkeley alumnus and MIT colleague Sophie Goldwasser won the Turing Award, the highest award in the computing industry.
In 2018, Silvio Micali launched the Algorand protocol and decided to completely solve the "impossible triangle" problem of blockchain.
13
Why MIT?
According to incomplete statistics, among leading Web3 projects, entrepreneurs from MIT account for the largest proportion of all universities.
Why MIT? MIT is active in various Bitcoin and blockchain-related organizations from the school to the student level.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative
Launched in 2015, the program is sponsored by the MIT Media Lab and involves MIT faculty and students. Members include the MIT Bitcoin Club, the MIT Bitcoin Project, and the Bitcoin Expo.
Personnel hired by the organization include former White House senior adviser on mobile and data innovation Brian Forde and current SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.
The organization has also received donations from the crypto industry. In May 2019, HDR Global Trading, the parent company of BitMEX, announced that it would donate to the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. In April 2022, crypto exchange Crypto.Com plans to make a four-year donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to support its digital currency initiatives.
MIT Sloan Blockchain Club
Official website:
https://sloangroups.mit.edu/blockchain/home/
MIT Bitcoin Club
An MIT student organization, one of the world’s oldest blockchain clubs, organizes weekly meetings for mutual education and discussion, as well as hosting hackathons and co-organizing the annual MIT Bitcoin Expo.
In 2014, on the eve of the first MIT Bitcoin Expo, members of the MIT Bitcoin Club gave out $100 worth of Bitcoin to every MIT undergraduate student to study how each student would How to use these virtual currencies.
Official website:
https://bitcoin.mit.edu/
MIT Bitcoin Expo
The MIT Bitcoin Expo was founded in 2014 and is hosted by the MIT Bitcoin Club. It is the earliest blockchain conference among all universities. The earliest discussion was about Bitcoin. Later, as the industry developed, the scope of discussion expanded to L1 and L2 infrastructure, privacy, supervision and governance, and decentralized applications.
This year's MIT Bitcoin Expo will be held on April 22-23. Speakers include Litecoin founder Qiwei Li, Nym CEO Harry Halpin, Lit Protocol founder David Sneider, etc.
Official website link:
https://www.mitbitcoinexpo.org/
Blockchain course
MIT is one of the first universities in the world to offer blockchain courses.
In 2015, the MIT Media Lab announced it would launch a digital currency course to inspire the next generation of Bitcoin talent.
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