FOUNDER POST
The Ethereum Foundation: How to go from Platonic Republic lead by philosopher-kings to a futarchic democracy of ETH holders
My history with Ethereum goes back to 2012, when I emailed Vitalik with the idea of "smart contractified companies" and got a same day (enthusiastic!) response.
In the following years, when I moved to Singapore, I spent a lot of time with the early Ethereans incl. Gavin Wood and for a while I was a Director in the Ethereum Foundation's (EF) Asian chapter.
The early Ethereans were still very accessible then and the EF was not a rich organization, so V and I teamed up looking for extra funding and budgeting for the next researchers he wanted to hire.
It was after Devcon Shanghai in 2016, where I first met Ming Chan, then Executive Director of the EF (who Laura Shin much maligned in her 2022 "The Cryptonians" book) that I started to feel things were getting too political and I'd rather just build on Ethereum.
The paradox at the heart of Ethereum
I felt then and still feel that there is a paradox at the heart of Ethereum between its values as a decentralized, permission-less technology and its centripetal, syndicate-style governance.
Plato's ideal form of State, a Republic lead by philosopher-kings, functions when its leaders are enlightened and act with integrity, and in all of the recent outburst of frustration within the community about how Ethereum is governed, nobody including myself questions V's integrity.
However for Ethereum to truly live its ideals in the next phase of its adoption (the next billion!), it needs to find a new equilibrium between its technology and social layer.
In this post, I want to propose a tentative design, based on the hundreds of Web3 governance experiments I've been involved with Otonomos' client side and as Lead of two decentralized projects myself, otoco.io and a more recent project for a decentralized school.
WEBINAR
Our ask from the new U.S. Administration
This Wednesday, January 29, at 9 a.m. Pacific Time, Otonomos is moderating a webinar that probes what the crypto community can realistically expect from the new U.S. Administration.
Our (libertarian) reflex is that the State and Government should stay out of crypto. Active involvement - by the new U.S. administration or any other government for that matter - risks favoritism and regulatory capture.
If the new U.S. administration wants to show crypto creds and make American buidl again, the best it can do is to simply not stand in the way.
Arguably, the main obstacle standing in the way of wider crypto adoption are the outdated and patronizing U.S. securities laws, which limit who can invest in new projects and digital assets.
> Register for our webinar on Wednesday 29 January to hear from three crypto practitioners what they think we can expect and what we feel is a fair ask from the Trump administration.
FROM THE OTONOMOS DEVELOPMENT DESK
KYC is something you ideally only want to do once
Corporate service providers ("CSPs") such as Otonomos who form and look after companies on behalf of their users have a legal obligation to know who their clients are.
This obligation on CSPs does not go as far as what is required from banks and other financial service providers, which does makes KYC easier, but a pain nonetheless, especially when companies are stacked like a wedding cake.
That is why we just pushed a new tool that not only makes onboarding faster and less painful, but also works across all entities you maintain with us of which you are the Beneficial Owner ("BO").
This means that when you order a new company from Otonomos but have already been KYCd as BO, you can frictionlessly add more entities to your stack and continue to expand your universe of companies.
In a next push, we will also automatically retrieve the "KYB" (Know Your Business) information of your existing entities with us, so you will not have to KYB the entity/ies that hold(s) your newly created company.
> Read about our new KYC tool and how to onboard fully online with Otonomos here.
>> Go to otonomos.com today to order and manage your universe of companies online, and pay in all major crypto.
