Builder: Nicholas Gregory
Language (s): C ++, oxide
Contribute (s/ed) to: Ocean Sidechain, mainstay, Mercury Wallet, Mercury Capa
Work (s/ed) in: Commerceblock (previously)
Before Bitcoin, Nicholas was a software developer who worked in the financial system for banking companies that develop trade platforms and derivatives. After the financial crisis of 2008, it began to consider alternatives to the financial system inherited in the consequences.
Like many of that moment, he completely ignored Slashdot’s original article with Bitcoin’s technical document due to the apparent approach to Windows as an application platform (Nicholas was a UNIX/Linux developer). Fortunately, someone who knew introduced Bitcoin later.
What captured his interest in Bitcoin instead of other alternatives at that time was its specific architecture as a distributed computer network.
“The fact that it was like an alternative form. Everything was based on [a] a bit […] grid. And what I mean by that, 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 several ways that people solved that problem, but it had never been done, you know, in a kind of […] Scalable solution And using […] Cryptography and work test to solve that problem was simply strange, to be honest. It was totally weird for me. “
All the other systems he had designed, and some that he built were distributed systems in multiple parts of the world. However, unlike Bitcoin, these systems were permits and restricted who could update the relevant databases despite the fact that the copies of them were distributed redundantly worldwide.
“The fact that Bitcoin had to do this work game, which is what it is. And whoever wins does the [database] write. That mess[ed] With my head. That was […] very unique. “
Starting to build
Nicholas’s path to 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 that time, the meetings were incredibly small, sometimes even less than a dozen people, so the environment was much more conducive to in -depth conversations than some bigger meetings these days.
First he began to build an “fan” on the counter exchange software (OTC) software for some people (at that time a very significant volume of Bitcoin OTC was negotiated by cash or other fiduciary media). From here, Nicholas and Omar Shibli, whom he met in Bitdevs, worked together in payment to the contract (BIP 175).
BIP 175 specifies a scheme in which a client who buys a good participates in the generation of the address provided by the merchant. This is the two for the first time in a contract that describes what is being paid, then the merchant sends a public teacher to the consumer, who uses the hash of that description of the article or service to generate an individual address using the hash and the public teacher.
This allows the client to prove what the merchant agreed to sell them and that the payment for the good or the service has been made. Simply publish the public key and the contract allow any third party to generate the address that was paid, and verify that the appropriate amount of funds would be sent there.
Ocean and Pilar
Nicholas and Omar went to Commerceblock, a Bitcoin infrastructure company. Commerceblock adopted a similar approach to businesses as a blockstream, building technological platforms to facilitate the use of Bitcoin and Blockchains in general in commerce and finance. Shortly after, Nicholas met Tom Trevethan, who joined.
“I met Tom through, yes, a common friend, happy to say who he is. There is a guy called, that new people probably do not know who he is, but Ogs does, John Muronis. John Matonis was a good friend of mine, [I’d] He knows him for a while. He introduced me to Tom, who was, you know, more on the side of the cryptography. And it was from there from there. “
The first important project in which they worked was Ocean, a fork of the Sidechain elements platform developed by blockstream on which the liquid lateral chain was based. The Coinshares and Blockchain companies in association with others launched an ocean -based Sidechain in 2019 to broadcast DGLD, a digital token backed by gold.
“So we, you know, we were working on elements of elements, making custom sidechins. […] Tom had some ideas about cryptography. And I think one of our first ideas was how to screw these forks on elements about […] The main bitcoin chain. […] We thought the cleaner way to do it was […] Using some kind of, I don’t remember, but it was something [based on] Single use sets, which was an invention of Peter Todd. And I think we implement it quite well with mainstay. “
The main distinction between the ocean and the liquid as a Sidechain platform is the use of Ocean of a protocol designed in Commerceblock called mainstay. Mainstay is a time brand protocol that, unlike OpenCestams, strictly orders the Merkle tree that builds instead of adding random elements in any order that is subjected. This allows each side chain to mark its current blockade in the bitcoin blocking route every time the miners of the main chain find a block.
While this is useless for any bitcoin set in the side chain, for the regulated assets of the real world (RWA), this provides a unique history of property that even the federation that operates the side chain cannot change. This eliminates property ambiguity during legal disputes.
When asked about the final closure of the project, Nicholas had this to say:
“I don’t know if we arrived early, but we had some customers. But it was, yes, there was not much adoption. I mean, Liquid was not doing incredible. And, you know, based in London/Europe, every time we met customers to do Poc, we were competing against other well -financed projects.
It shows how many years they had received money from people like IBM or some of the great consultancies and were promoting Hyperledger. Or it was the days we would be competing against Eos and Tazos. So, because we were as a company that needed money to build prototypes or build lateral technologies, made it very difficult. And at that time there was not much adoption. “
Mercury wallet and mercury layer
After closing Ocean, Nicholas and Tom finally began working in a Statechain implementation, although the road to this was not easy.
“[T]Here were some things that happened at the same time that they took it. So the two things were that we were involved in a [proof of concept]A very small […]PIC for a potential customer. But this rolled for discreet registration contracts. And one of the challenges of discrete registration contracts are very inefficient of capital. So we wanted a novate form of those contracts. And it happened that Ruben Sampson, you know, wrote this type of white paper/average publication on Statechains. AND […] Those two ideas, which potentially resolved that problem around DLC. “
In the end, they did not end up deploying a Statechain solution to administer DLC, but were in a different direction.
Well, there was something else happening at the same time, coins. And, yes, keep in mind, in those days, everyone worried that […] 2024/2025 […] Network rates could be quite high. And do […] Coin swaps, you want to make several rounds. So […] The status chains felt perfect because […] Basically, you take a utxo, you put it from the chain and then you can change it as much as you want. “
Mercury Wallet was completely built and functional, but unfortunately he never won any adoption of the user. Samourai’s wallet and Wasabi wallet at that time dominated the privacy tool ecosystem, and Mercury Wallet could never successfully take a bite of the market.
Instead of giving up completely, they returned to the drawing board to build a Statechain variant using Schnorr with the blind signs of the coordinator server, which means that I could not see what I was signing. When asked why these changes were made, he had this to say: “That would give us much more flexibility to do other things in Bitcoin with L2s. You already know, at the time you have a blinded solution, we think, well, this could begin to have interoperability with a lightning.”
Instead of building a user’s wallet this time, they created a software development kit (SDK) that could be integrated with other wallets.
“{…]I suppose that with the mercury layer, I was building a kind of a kind of […] Layer 2 of full right that anyone could use. So us [built] It’s like a SDK. We had a default wallet that people could execute. But we expected other people to integrate it. ”
The end of Commerceblock
In the end, Commerceblock closed its doors after many years of brilliant engineering work. Nicholas and the rest of the team built numerous systems and protocols that were very well designed, but at the end of the day they always seemed to be one step ahead of the curve. That is not necessarily something good when it comes to building systems for end users.
If your work is too much ahead of user demand, in the end that is not a sustainable strategy.
“… Being in the United Kingdom, which is not doing that well from a regulatory point of view, was played in it. If I lived in Dubai, maybe it would have been a different conversation. You know, when we made that decision … things were not great in the United States. I think things have improved there. But also, I think … Bitcoin is a financial place.
When asked why he thought people did not use layer 2 at a scale, I had this to say: “… in my adventures of working in Civil (A decentralized market)One of the questions that always asked me is, when it is tied, when Stablecoins? So, when you are working on a project that is trying to promote Bitcoin in the global south, but all you know in the Global South want Stablecoins, you start asking yourself, well, am I building the right tool? Do people even want to use this?
At the end of the day, the most useful and solid engineering work must still be adopted and used, otherwise, what is the value of it first?
“… there has been a change in the last four years to be a reserve of wealth. And I think it is a risk because I think that if people were using bitcoin at this time and the Mempool was expensive, it was stuck and the rates were high, there are enough bright people to build good L2s. But they are not being built because there is no demand. And I think that is one of the challenges of Bitcoin at this time.
“I think there are many intelligent people in Bitcoin who can build interesting things, but I think the approach now has to be users.”
