0/ Yesterday was my last day as the Rosetta Technical Lead at @coinbase. Starting tomorrow (crypto never sleeps, right?), I’ll join @el33th4xor, @kevinsekniqi, and the rest of the talented team at @avalabsofficial in building @avalancheavax.

1/ When I joined Coinbase out of college, I thought I “knew” blockchain. Boy was I wrong! Standardizing and scaling asset addition at Coinbase while collaborating with the top blockchain engineers at the top projects by market cap flipped my world upside down.
2/ I don’t think there is any other place that ramps you up into the magical moon math of crypto as fast as @coinbase and I firmly believe it is the best place for any crypto engineer to start their career. Good news! They're hiring! https://t.co/NOuZ2L5x1s
3/ To all my former coworkers, I want to say thank you for everything you’ve taught me. I’ll never forget all the time and energy you spent helping me become a better engineer and a better person. I have no doubt that you’ll continue pushing Rosetta forward for years to come.
4/ For the next few months, I’ll remain an advisor to the Rosetta project. I will lend a hand to asset issuers implementing Rosetta for the first time and chime in on high-level design decisions.
5/ On that note, it's great to see the work @figment_io and @avalabsofficial have already done to create a Rosetta C-Chain implementation for @avalancheavax. If you’re looking to test drive the C-Chain, I think this is one of the easiest ways to do so: https://t.co/UmTr9guM5L
6/ Now, why @avalabsofficial? Investment cycles in the L1 space occur every few years, at most, and we are at the end of the current period (credit to @el33th4xor for reminding me of this).
7/ When considering leaving Coinbase for the world of L1s, I had the option of doing something now (preferably 6 months ago) or to wait a few more years for the next wave of ideas to take hold. Long story short, waiting a few more years would have driven me nuts.
8/ Because of my position at Coinbase, it was my job to deeply study all of the consequential L1s launched in the last few years. Over time, I formed a pretty strong opinion that any project I would join must have certain attributes.
9/ I felt any project I would consider joining must support general smart contracting while retaining expansive composability, scale through loosely-connected but distinct subspaces, and enable thousands of people to serve as block producers in consensus.
10/ I looked long and hard for projects that checked all of these boxes but most promising teams ended up failing to check the last block, inclusive consensus. Enter @avalancheavax.
11/ When I came across the @avalancheavax paper produced by Team Rocket, I felt, like many others, there was something materially novel here. As I dug in deeper and deeper, I kept looking for the “but….”, however, I never found one.
12/ I felt @avalancheavax was finally the solution to the inclusive consensus problem that tripped up other PoS approaches. Don’t take my work for it. Ask @tederminant, the creator of one of the most performant PBFT protocols, why he left that work to co-found @avalabsofficial.
13/ As you can tell, I really really care about this inclusive consensus issue. To make it even easier for anyone to create, run, and monitor their own @avalancheavax validator, I created a tool called snowplow.
14/ This tool helps you back up your staking credentials, validator db, and even sends text message alerts if something goes haywire! https://t.co/5aNo4UzM8s
15/ Well, that’s all for now. Until next time...From Snowflake to Avalanche. Per consensum ad astra.

More from Crypto

Back with another #FreeLoveFriday. Last time, we covered how Mastercoin/@Omni_Layer pioneered digital asset issuance on blockchains. Today, let’s discuss @Chainlink and the vital role it plays in connecting blockchains to the real world.


I have said repeatedly that digital asset issuance is the killer application for blockchains. The next frontier is bringing real world assets to networks like @AvalancheAVAX, but we often face a significant problem:

Namely, how do you get data from the real world onto blockchains and into applications running on them? More critically, how do you achieve that securely and transparently in real-time? Smart contracts are tamper-proof, but they're only as reliable as their input data.

Enter ChainLink in September 2017, with a whitepaper outlining a vision for a decentralized network of “oracles,” entities that inject facts from the external world into blockchains in a suitable format for smart contracts.

Until ChainLink, oracles were trusted and centralized. This is a huge problem for high-value assets and smart contracts. High value projects, such as @CelsiusNetwork, @synthetix_io, @Aaveaave and others depend critically on oracle data.

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1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”

Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.