Builder: Nicholas Gregory
Language (S): C ++, Rust
Contribution (S/ED) to: Ocean Sidechain, Mainstay, Mercury Wallet, Mercury Layer
WORK (S/ED) A: Commerceblock (previously)
Before Bitcoin, Nicholas was a software developer who worked in the financial system for banking companies that develop trading and derivatives platforms. After the 2008 financial crisis, he began to consider alternatives to the Legacy financial system in repercussions.
Like many of that moment, Slashdot’s original article has completely ignored with White Paper Bitcoin due to the apparent attention to Windows as an application platform (Nicholas was a Unix/Linux developer). Fortunately, someone who knew introduced him to Bitcoin later.
The thing that captured his interest in Bitcoin rather than other alternatives at the time was his specific architecture as a distributed computer network.
“The fact that it was like an alternative way. It was all based on [a] type […] net. And what I mean for this, building financial systems, people always wanted a system that was 24-7.
And how do you deal with someone who interacts [with] In different geographical parts of the world without being centralized?
And I had seen various ways to solve that problem, but it had never been done, you know, in a kind of […] scalable solution. And using […] The encryption and proof of work to solve this problem were simply strange, to be honest. It was totally strange to me. “
All the other systems it had designed, and some that built, were systems distributed in several parts of the world. Unlike Bitcoin, however, these systems were authorized and limited, who could update the pertinent databases despite what the copies were distributed in a global redundant way.
“The fact that Bitcoin has all had somehow doing this work test, which is what it is. And anyone who wins does [database] write. That mess[ed] with my head. That was […] Really unique. “
Starting to build
Nicholas’ path towards construction in space was organic. At the time he lived in New York City, and being a developer, of course, he found the original Bitdevs founded in New York. At the time the meetings were incredibly small, sometimes even less than a dozen people, so the environment was much more favorable to in -depth conversations than some bigger meetings these days.
He started building a “hobbyist” trading software stack (OTC) for some people (then then a very significant volume of Bitcoin for cash or other Fiat vehicles was exchanged). From here Nicholas and Omar Shibli, who met in Bitdevs, worked together on Pay to contract (bip 175).
Bip 175 specifies a scheme in which a customer who buys a good participates in the generation of the address that the trader provides. This is done by the two for the first time that they agree a contract that describes what is paid, then the trader sends a main public key to the consumer, who uses the hash of that description of the article or the service to generate an individual address using the public key hash and masters.
This allows the customer to demonstrate what the trader has agreed to sell them and that the payment for the good or the service has been made. The simple publication of the public key and the Master contract allows third parties to generate the address that has been paid and verifies that the appropriate amount of funds has been sent there.
Ocean and pillar
Nicholas and Omar have continued to found Commerceblock, a Bitcoin infrastructure company. Commerceblock has adopted an approach similar to business such as Blockstream, building technological platforms to facilitate the use of bitcoins and blockchain in general in trade and finance. Shortly afterwards Nicholas met Tom Trevethan who went on board.
“I met Tom away, yes, a common friend, happy to say who he is. There is a boy called, who probably new people don’t know who he is, but Ogs do it, John Matonis. John Matonis was a good friend of mine, [I’d] you know him for a while. He made me know Tom, who was, you know, a little more on the side of the encryption. And in a sense it went from there. “
The first large project they worked on was Ocean, a fork of the Sidechain Elements platform developed by Blockstream on which liquid sidechain was based. The CoinShares and Blockchain companies in collaboration with others have launched a sidechain based in Ocean in 2019 to issue DGLD, a digital token supported by gold.
“So we, you know, were working on forks of elements, making Sidechain made to measure. […] Tom had some ideas on encryption. And I think one of our first ideas has been on how bull on these forks of elements on […] The main chain of Bitcoin. […] We thought the cleanest way to do it was […] Using a sort of, I don’t remember, but it was something [based on] Schools sealed for disposable use, which was an invention of Peter Todd. And I think we implemented it quite well with Mainstay. “
The main distinction between the ocean and liquid as the Sidechain platform is the use by the ocean of a protocol designed for commercial trade called mainstay. Mainstay is a TimesTamping protocol which, unlike OpenTimestamps, rigorously orders the Merkle tree which instead builds to accidentally add objects in any order in which they are presented. This allows each Sidechain of TimesTamp its current block in the bitcoin blockchain every time the Mainchain miners find a block.
Although this is useless for any bitcoin anchored in the sidechain, for the activities of the regulated real world (RWA), this provides a singular history of ownership that even the federation that manages the sidechain cannot change. This removes the ambiguity of the property during legal disputes.
When asked about the eventual project, Nicholas had this to say:
“I don’t know if we were soon, but we had some customers. But it was, yes, there was not much adoption. I want to say, Liquid was not surprising. And you know, being based in London/Europe, every time we met the customers to do the poc, we were competing with other well -finished projects.
Show how many years ago they had received money from people like IBM or some of the big consultations and were promoting Hyperledger. Or were the days when we would compete against Eos and Tezos. So, since we were like a company that needed money to build prototypes or build Sidechain, made it very difficult. And then there wasn’t much adoption. “
Wallet of mercury and mercury layer
After closing Ocean, Nicholas and Tom in the end they started working on an implementation of StateCain, although the path of this was not easy.
“[T]Here are some things that were happening at the same time that led him. So the two things where we were involved in a [proof of concept]a very small […]Poc for as a potential customer. But this shot the discrete registration contracts. And one of the challenges of discreet registration contracts are very inefficient. So we wanted a way to Novate those contracts. And so it happened that Ruben Sampson, you know, wrote this type of white/post -medium post on StateCains. AND […] Those two ideas, that type of potentially solved that problem around the DLC. “
In the end they did not end to implement a StateCain solution for the management of the DLC, but they went in a different direction.
Well, another thing is happening at the same time, Coinswaps. And yes, keep in mind, in those days, everyone worried […] 2024/2025 […] Network commissions may be quite high. And do […] SWAPS of coins, in a certain sense you want to make more rounds. AS […] State chains seemed perfect because […] Basically take an utxo, put it out of the chain and then you can exchange it as much as you want. “
The mercury portfolio was completely built and functional, but unfortunately it never obtained the adoption of users. Samourai’s wallet and the Wasabi portfolio at the time dominated the ecosystem of the privacy tools and the mercury portfolio has never been able to successfully take a bite from the market.
Instead of completely surrendering, they returned to the drawing table to build a variant of StateCain using Schnorr with the blind signature of the coordinator’s server, which means that he could not see what he was signing. When he was asked why these changes were made, he had this to say: “This would have given us much more flexibility to do other things in Bitcoin with L2.
Instead of building a wallet in front of the user this time, they created a software development kit (SDK) which could be integrated with other wallets.
“{…]I imagine with Mercury Layer, he was building a lot of a kind of […] Level 2 in all respects that anyone could use. Therefore we [built] Like a SDK. We had a predefined portfolio that people could run. But we hoped that other people integrated it. “
The end of trade
In the end, Commerceblock closed its doors after many years of brilliant engineering works. Nicholas and the rest of the team built numerous systems and protocols that were very well designed, but in the end they seemed to be always a step forward compared to the curve. It is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to building systems for end users.
If your work is too far ahead of the users’ question, in the end it is not a sustainable strategy.
“… to be in the United Kingdom, which is not doing so well from a regulatory point of view, played. Adoption.”
When he was asked why he thought that people did not use the 2S level on a large scale, he had this to say: “… in my adventures to work on Civkit (a decentralized market)One of the questions that has always been asked to me is, when the tether, when the stablecoins? So when you are working on a project that is trying to promote Bitcoin in the global South, but all those who meet in the global South want Stablecoin, start asking you, well, am I built the right tool? Do people even want to use it? “
At the end of the day, the most useful and sound engineering work has yet to be adopted and used, otherwise what is its value in the first place?
“… in the last four years there has been a change to be a wealth shop. And I think it is a risk because I think that if people used Bitcoin right now and the mempool was expensive, it was jammed and the taxes were high, there are quite bright people to build a good L2. And I think it is one of the Bitcoin challenges right now.
“I think there are many smart people in Bitcoin who can build interesting things, but I think the focus must now be users.”