I had my blockchain moment in October 2016. That moment when you realize that blockchain technology is going to drastically change finance, business, society—almost every facet of our lives. I bought as much Ether (the currency on the Ethereum network) as I could afford and booked a flight to Ireland to compete in a blockchain hackathon. I built my first decentralized application or dapp and was hooked. I quit my job. I didn’t have a plan, but I had an exciting idea: to build an Ethereum node from scratch.

I had gotten into Elixir and was loving its functional elements. Elixir runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine. Erlang was built in the 80s by Ericsson, so it’s been seriously battle tested. Today it is used by WhatsApp, Facebook (for chat), Amazon, T-Mobile, and Motorola, to name a few. It offers massive scalability with high availability requirements. That sounded like a perfect fit for an Ethereum node. I created the Exthereum repo and got to work.

About a month into it, I got an email from Ayrat Badykov, who had the same idea and was also building an Ethereum node in Elixir. To our surprise, we had both named our project Exthereum! When Ayrat asked if I wanted to join forces, I eagerly accepted. It worked out great: he’d been working on a Merkle Patricia Tree implementation, and I’d been working on implementing the virtual machine.

Ayrat found out that Geoff Hayes was also working on the same idea and—surprise!—his project was also called Exthereum. That made three engineers that had started the same project with the same name in San Francisco, Moscow, and Martha’s Vineyard. Ayrat reached out to Geoff, we merged in Geoff’s work, and we continued as a team.

Geoff was also working on Compound, a company that will allow users to borrow and lend value on the blockchain. In August, Geoff invited me to join their team, and I thought it was a great idea. I was excited about Exthereum, but thought that building a real-world dapp on top of Ethereum would give me a better understanding of what that was like as well. I went to SF, we worked through the fall, and come December we had a working alpha!

Around that same time, the managing director of OmiseGo reached out to us and said they were exploring the idea of using Exthereum in their Plasma implementation. OmiseGo is one of the most well respected names in the space so we were excited to chat with them. When we got on the call they told us that Exthereum was also being considered for the Ethereum Foundation Grants Progam. They’d been in contact with Vitalik, and said he supported funding us as well. I remember looking over my monitor with wide eyes at the other people around the office, trying to keep a straight face and to stop myself from jumping around the room. It was at that point I realized it was time for me to scale down my time with Compound and focus primarily on Exthereum.

I began to plan my next steps. First and foremost, I wanted to get Ethereum off of Proof of Work. The Ethereum network burns about as much energy as 1.5 million US homes. This little “experiment” is fine but it’s irresponsible to be burning that amount of energy in the long term. In using the network, we are directly responsible for that waste. Fortunately, there is a potential solution that uses very little energy: proof of stake. The Ethereum Foundation and others have done great research in the space, and the plan is to eventually switch Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake.

The other major goal I had was to switch from the Ethereum Virtual Machine to the WebAssembly Virtual Machine. Building the Compound alpha for the previous few months had been more challenging than I had expected it to be. Blockchain development is so hard because the tools are very new; the tools are new because they have to work with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which has only been around for a couple years.

But programming for systems with limited resources at runtime is nothing new. If we weren’t limited to Ethereum-specific tools and languages, we could build on all the work that’s already been done and leverage existing communities, instead of having to write everything from scratch. WebAssembly can be compiled by LLVM, which means you could write smart contracts in C, C++, Kotlin, Rust, and many others. This would also open up the tooling and communities of all of those languages. Imagine how much easier this would make the experience of building dapps.

Exthereum is about 80% complete. Geoff has devp2p hooked up, which can connect to Geth and Parity nodes. I have a large majority of the Virtual machine tests passing. Ayrat has a fully functioning Merkle Patricia Tree and RPL encoding and decoding working as well. The remaining things to complete are:

  • Get ethhash the Ethereum Proof of Work algorithm hooked up (this hasn’t been started)
  • Find and fix the remaining bugs in the Virtual Machine
  • Find and fix the remaining bugs in devp2p

Doing all of this will take a ton of time. As anyone in software development knows, having something 80% done by no means means that you’re 80% done in terms of time. Also, most of the work left to be done will eventually be scrapped anyway. Once proof of stake is implemented, ethash will be obsolete, and once the EVM is replaced with the WebAssembly VM, the EVM will be, too. Devp2p is also going under a considerable refactor.

If we had applied for Ethereum Dev Grants program and gotten in we’d have a nice chunk of money in the bank and probably have been able to get Exthereum to feature parity with Parity and Geth. Positioning Exthereum as a first class client would have opened a huge amount of doors for us many of which would be financially lucrative as well. There’s the potential to make obscene amounts of money in the blockchain space right now but there’s also something much more lucrative: The potential to change the world.

I had a choice. I could build on an existing platform working on components that would eventually be scrapped or I could build something that was new and better. I had the option to build a blockchain that was both more developer friendly and more sustainable. So that’s what I decided to do.

Introducing Ellipticoin

Elitpicoin will be a decentralized network that runs smart contracts in the WebAssembly Virtual Machine. This allows developers to write smart contracts in any language that targets WebAssembly including Rust, Kotlin, C and C++ to name a few. Ellipticoin forms consensus using Proof of Stake which uses much less energy than the alternative, Proof of Work

The two questions most people ask when they hear about a blockchain project are “where is the white paper?” and “will there be a token sale?” The answers are: “there isn’t one” and “maybe.”

I always thought the the idea of a white paper had suspicious parallels to religious scripture. I worry that when people believe in the idea behind a white paper they become attached to it. And when they become attached to it they adopt it as part of their identity. (Paul Graham wrote a great piece about keeping your identity small.) I worry that this attachment will lead people to resist change. Granted, some things need to to stay constant. Just like Bitcoin, there will only ever be 21 million Ellipticoins. But, like with all software, adaptability is paramount. It’s better to build software that is adaptable than to try to build something that’s perfect from the start.

Time is also a factor. I’d much rather spend my time blogging about how Elitpicoin works than setting up a LaTeX editor and figuring out how to center my name of the cover page. I’ve written a brief overview of how the system will work here and I plan to write more as Ellipticoin develops.

As far as raising money goes: when building the networks that will control the flow of value throughout the world, it’s important that we think about what it is we consider valuable and how that value flows. Currently, the majority of excess value pools at the top. What’s more important: Buying fancy cars for already privileged, disproportionately white males, or buying food, shelter, and medicine for thousands of people who can’t afford it? I’m a greedy human just like everyone else, but our current value system just doesn’t make sense. Engrained value systems won’t change on their own but they can change if enough people want them to. With this in mind, if I do do a token sale, I will donate 90% of the proceeds to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and The International Rescue Committee. With that said, I don’t plan on raising money until at least a year from now. I don’t want to raise money until Ellipticoin is fully functional. At a certain point money can be more of a hindrance than an asset.

Finally, Bob Summerwill gave a great talk about ending the tribalism in the blockchain community at EthCC recently. I know this post will ruffle feathers and I’ll be attacked for posting it. People will tell me why Ellipticoin is a bad idea and why I’m going to fail. That’s just the way the internet works these days.

I know building a blockchain from scratch is a moonshot and chances of success are small. The technical part is the fun stuff, and I’ve had a blast working on Ellipticoin for the past couple months. I’m not so much looking forward to the politics of it, but the promise that the blockchain holds is worth it for me. I hope that I can remain as cordial as possible with those who disagree with me and that we can work together whenever possible. If anyone is interested in helping out, I look forward to hearing from you—there’s always plenty to do!

Also, I’ll be at the MIT Bitcoin Expo Friday through Sunday. I’d love to chat if anyone’s around!

Looking forward to seeing where this goes!

-M