On February 22, the founder of NFT trading platform Blur revealed his identity and said he had studied in the Computer Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In addition to NFT trading platforms, graduates and professors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have a place in multiple tracks of Web3 and Crypto, including public chains, exchanges, VC, media, Layer2, etc.
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 global economics and management practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management, including a course called Blockchain and Currency. He is also a senior advisor to the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative.
In 2018, Gary Gensler introduced blockchain technology at MIT
On April 17, 2021, Gary Gensler was sworn in as SEC Chairman.
As the SEC chairman who knows the most about cryptocurrency in history, Gary Gensler's appointment is highly anticipated by cryptocurrency professionals. They speculate that the previously delayed Bitcoin ETF will be approved soon, and the lengthy lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple will soon be settled through a settlement.
Unfortunately, the above expectations seem to have been dashed at present.
Gary Gensler's view on cryptocurrencies is that BTC is a commodity and should be regulated by the CFTC. Most other crypto assets are securities, and crypto exchanges are securities exchanges. Both issuers and exchanges are obliged to register with the SEC. This means that the SEC's legal basis for regulating cryptocurrencies is to follow the securities law, but there is currently no accurate definition of which cryptocurrencies are securities.
How effective is Gary Gensler's approach to cryptocurrency regulation?
During Gary Gensler's tenure, many events occurred, including the Luna collapse, the bankruptcy of Three Arrows Capital, the bankruptcy of lending platforms such as Celsius and Voyager, and the bankruptcy of FTX. The damage these events caused to investors was unprecedented.
Gary Gensler's work has also caused dissatisfaction among some people. For example, U.S. Congressman Tom Emmer accused Gary Gensler of being casual and unfocused in collecting information on crypto companies, and of refusing to provide Congress with the requested information, causing Congress to miss investigations into Terra, FTX and other incidents.
On February 10, the SEC ordered the crypto exchange Kraken to "immediately" end its crypto collateral-as-a-service offering 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: Whether through staking as a service, lending, or other means, cryptocurrency intermediaries need to provide appropriate disclosures and protections required by securities laws when offering investment contracts in exchange for investors' tokens.
This explanation was not satisfactory. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said that the SEC’s punishment of Kraken was a “lazy” regulatory approach and that a pledge guide should be issued to guide registration. Nansen founder Alex Svanevik said that it would be easy for the exchange to be transparent about its ETH pledges without the SEC’s “help.”
On February 13, the SEC sent a notice to the crypto company Paxos, stating that the digital asset Binance USD (BUSD) issued and listed by Paxos is an unregistered security that violates investor protection laws, and the SEC plans to sue the company.
The SEC's regulatory approach has angered cryptocurrency moguls, with Messari founder Ryan Selkis saying that sensible regulation is important and that a de facto ban will be met with ruthless blows. He will spend every bit of energy and political capital to fight the enemies of cryptocurrency.
FTX founder: SBF
His full name is Sam Bankman-Fried. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2010 to 2014.
After graduating from MIT with a degree in physics, SBF worked for Jane Street, a quantitative trading company on Wall Street, for three years. In 2017, he founded Alameda Research in a rented house in Berkeley, California. In May 2019, he established FTX, an exchange focusing on the derivatives trading market, in Hong Kong.
FTX's success is inseparable from the right time, place and people.
Good timing: At the end of the year after FTX was founded, the global COVID-19 pandemic broke out. In March 2020, the spread of the pandemic led to the collapse of the financial market, and the Federal Reserve opened the floodgates. In the following two years, the total amount of money printed by the United States was almost the same as in the past 40 years. Under the flood of money, the crypto market ushered in a violent bull market, and FTX soared.
Geographical advantage: After the "94" regulation in 2017, mainland China completely banned entities operating virtual currencies. Singapore and Hong Kong became gathering places for cryptocurrency participants.
Renhe: FTX's narrative and the image of Wall Street white elites created by SBF are very popular among the elites. It has raised more than US$3.2 billion in financing from BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Canada's third largest pension fund, Singapore's state-owned investment institution Temasek, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Tiger Global Fund, Multicoin, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures and other institutions, with a valuation of US$32 billion, becoming the fastest growing cryptocurrency company in history.
However, among all the "people", the relationship between SBF and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has been a concern for the spectators since FTX went bankrupt. Simply put, SBF and Gary Gensler are both from MIT, one graduated from MIT, and the other teaches at MIT. Caroline is the CEO of another company of SBF, Alameda. 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 had met with SBF before FTX went bankrupt. The whistleblower claimed that Gensler may have helped SBF and FTX obtain a regulatory monopoly through legal loopholes.
Blur founder: Pacman (Tienshun)
Pacman is the alias of Tieshun Roquerre.
From 2016 to 2018, Pacman majored in mathematics and computer science at MIT.
In 2022, Pacman founded the NFT trading platform Blur anonymously. In March 2022, Blur completed a $11 million seed round of financing, led by Paradigm.
Before Blur came along, Opensea’s absolute dominance in the NFT trading market was unshakable. Although x2y2 and LooksRare attempted to stage Sushiswap’s “vampire attack” on Uniswap by issuing tokens, they all failed.
On October 20, 2022, Blur was officially launched. According to Dune Analytics data, on October 31, Blur's weekly transaction volume exceeded Opensea. Before that, no trading platform had a weekly transaction volume of 1/2 of Opensea. On February 22, Blur's daily transaction volume was US$115 million, while Opensea's was less than US$15 million.
Pacman’s execution was amazing, he took himself and Blur from nothing to being known heroes in just 3 months.
However, just like the "DeFi God Mine" that emerged after the DeFi summer and relied on token rewards to rise from the ground, what will happen when Blur's token rewards are reduced or exhausted? This analysis by Delphi Digital researcher Teng Yan is worth reading.
Optimism Founder: Jinglan Wang
Jinglan Wang is currently the only female founder behind a project with a market value of tens of billions of US dollars in the Web3 field.
2018 San Francisco Blockchain Week, moderated by Jinglan Wang
The MIT Bitcoin Club was Jinglan Wang’s launch into a career in cryptocurrency.
Jinglan Wang served as president of the Wellesley Bitcoin Club and director of the MIT Bitcoin Expo.
Jinglan Wang is so obsessed with cryptocurrency that she even switched her major to computer science in college just to better understand it.
From March 2017 to August 2018, Jinglan Wang served as the executive director of Blockchain Education Network (BEN), a non-profit organization focused on blockchain education founded in 2014 by crypto tycoon Jeremy Gardner and Bitcoin clubs at colleges and universities across the United States.
Jinglan Wang has been researching Ethereum's scalability since 2015.
In 2019, Jinglan Wang founded the non-profit research organization Plasma Group with Benjamin Jones, Karl Floersch, and Kevin Ho. Plasma is Ethereum's second-layer expansion technology, proposed by Vitalik and Joseph Poon in 2017.
In January 2020, Plasma Group announced its transition from a research collective to a for-profit startup called Optimism, backed by $3.5 million from Paradigm and IDEO CoLab Ventures.
This shift toward a for-profit startup was initially met with skepticism from outsiders, such as Ashwin Ramachandran, partner at Dragonfly Capital, who described the transition as “the death of Plasma.”
In March 2022, Optimism completed a $150 million financing, with a valuation of $1.65 billion. It became a crypto unicorn in 2 years. On June 1 of the same year, Optimism officially launched its governance token OP and started an airdrop, which made the entire crypto world excited.
Just yesterday, Optimism token OP, a new L2 blockchain Base built by Coinbase based on OP Stack, rose against the trend, with a total circulation market value of more than 10 billion US dollars.
Matt Huang, Founder of Paradigm
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 2019 by the public account "Luanfanshu", Huang Gongyu's return on this investment was about 2,000 times, when ByteDance was valued at about US$75 billion.
In June 2018, after leaving Sequoia Capital, Matt Huang co-founded the crypto venture capital firm Paradigm with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam.
Matt Huang (right) and Fred Ehrsam
Since its establishment, Paradigm has secured leading projects in almost all sub-segments of the Web3 field, including Blur, the NFT trading platform with the largest trading volume, Uniswap, the largest DEX, and Optimism, the Layer2 network with the highest market value. Of course, there have been times when we failed, such as investing in FTX.
Compared with its successful investment cases, what is most impressive about Paradigm is its ability to quickly implement research capabilities and lead industry trends.
For example, the NFT artwork Art Gobblers, which was popular in November last year, was created by researchers at Paradigm 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 has launched a perpetual cooperative option product.
Lightspark founder: Christian Catalini
From 2014 to 2021, Christian Catalini served as an assistant professor and then an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab.
From 2018 to 2022, Christian Catalini served as co-founder of Diem/Libra and chief economist of Meta FinTech.
A small story also happened during this period. An MIT researcher accused Facebook of plagiarizing the results of a paper published in July 2018 in the design of Libra.
In February 2022, Diem was sold for approximately $200 million, and Meta's cryptocurrency dream was shattered.
In May 2022, he became co-founder and chief strategy officer of Lightspark.
In addition, he currently serves part-time as an economic advisor to Algorand, a technical advisor to Chainlink Labs, and on the advisory board of the Coinbase Research Institute.
Ryan Selkis, Founder of Messari
Ryan Selkis attended MIT Sloan School of Management from 2013-2014, earning his Master of Business Administration.
In January 2018, Ryan Selkis founded Messari with the goal of building research tools for crypto businesses and professionals.
In September 2022, Messari received $35 million and its valuation reached $300 million.
Michael Saylor, Founder of MicroStrategy
Michael Saylor studied aerospace engineering at MIT from 1983 to 1987, and founded the business intelligence company MicroStrategy after graduation. In 1998, MicroStrategy was listed on NASDAQ.
MicroStrategy purchased Bitcoin for the first time in July 2020. According to Coinglass data, MicroStrategy currently holds 129,600 BTC, making it the listed company with the most BTC.
Tesla followed closely behind. Tesla's purchase of Bitcoin is also somewhat related to Michael Saylor. In December 2020, Musk asked on Twitter about the feasibility of buying a large amount of Bitcoin. Michael Saylor suggested that Tesla convert its balance sheet from US dollars to BTC.
In February 2021, Tesla submitted an announcement to the SEC that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin.
Uri Kolodny, Co-founder and CEO of StarkWare
From 1998 to 2000, Uri Kolodny studied for his MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Uri Kolodny is the co-founder and CEO of StarkWare from November 2017 to present.
In May 2022, Starkware announced a $100 million financing with a valuation of $8 billion. Investors include Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, Pantera Capital and Vitalik.
Celo founder Rene Reinsberg
Rene Reinsberg studied for his MBA at MIT from 2009 to 2011 and is the founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center.
From 2020 to date, Rene Reinsberg serves as the chairman of the Celo Foundation.
Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin
In 1999, Li Qiwei graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2011, Charlie Lee modified the Bitcoin code to create Litecoin.
The crypto world is always full of meme-seeking. With the marketing slogan of “Bitcoin is gold, Litecoin is silver”, Litecoin has gained a firm foothold in the crypto world. Thousands of altcoins that appeared in the same period gradually disappeared in the subsequent waves, while Litecoin miraculously survived every trough.
In 2018, Charlie Lee liquidated his Litecoin holdings at its peak, and donated part of the proceeds to the Litecoin Foundation and MIT's digital currency initiative.
Silvio Micali, Founder of Algorand
Silvio Micali is a professor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) since 1983.
In 2012, Silvio Micali and Berkeley alumnus and MIT colleague Safie Goldwasser won the Turing Award, the highest award in the computer industry.
In 2018, Silvio Micali launched the Algorand protocol, determined to completely solve the blockchain "impossible triangle" problem.
Why MIT?
According to incomplete statistics, among the top Web3 projects, entrepreneurs from MIT account for the largest proportion among all universities.
Why MIT? MIT has a variety of Bitcoin and blockchain-related organizations active at both the school and student levels.
MIT Digital Currency Initiative
The initiative was launched in 2015 by the MIT Media Lab and is jointly participated by MIT faculty and students. Members include the MIT Bitcoin Club, the MIT Bitcoin Project, and the Bitcoin Expo.
The organization's hires include Brian Forde, former White House senior adviser for mobile and data innovation, and current SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.
The organization has also received donations from the crypto industry. In May 2019, BitMEX parent company HDR Global Trading 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 MIT to support its digital currency initiative.
MIT Sloan Blockchain Club
Official website:
https://sloangroups.mit.edu/blockchain/home/
MIT Bitcoin Club
A student organization at MIT, one of the earliest blockchain clubs in the world, it organizes weekly meetings for mutual education and discussion, hosts hackathons, and co-organizes the annual MIT Bitcoin Expo.
In 2014, on the eve of the first MIT Bitcoin Expo, members of the MIT Bitcoin Club gave $100 worth of Bitcoin to every MIT undergraduate to study how each student would use the virtual currency.
Official website:
https://bitcoin.mit.edu/
MIT Bitcoin Expo
Founded in 2014, MIT Bitcoin Expo is hosted by the MIT Bitcoin Club and is the oldest blockchain conference in any university. Initially, it discussed Bitcoin, and later, as the industry developed, the scope of discussion expanded to L1 and L2 infrastructure, privacy, regulation and governance, and decentralized applications.
This year’s MIT Bitcoin Expo will be held on April 22-23. Speakers include Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, Nym CEO Harry Halpin, Lit Protocol founder David Sneider, and others.
Official website link:
https://www.mitbitcoinexpo.org/
Blockchain Courses
MIT is one of the first universities in the world to offer blockchain courses.
In 2015, the MIT Media Lab announced that it would offer a digital currency course to inspire the next generation of Bitcoin talent.