Builder: Nicholas Gregory
Language: C++, rusty
Contributions (S/ED): Ocean Sidechain, Pillars, Mercury Wallet, Mercury Layer
Work (S/ED), URL: CommerceBlock (formerly)
Before using Bitcoin, Nicholas was a software developer working in the financial system for banking companies that develop trade and derivatives platforms. After the 2008 financial crisis, he began to consider alternatives to the traditional financial system in the consequences.
Like many since then, he completely ignored the original Slashdot article, which contained the Bitcoin white paper, because it was obviously focused on Windows as an application platform (Nicholas is a Unix/Linux developer). Thankfully, someone he knew later introduced him to Bitcoin.
What attracted his interest in Bitcoin and not other alternatives at the time was its specific architecture as a distributed computer network.
“It’s an alternative. It’s all based on [a] kind of […] network. I mean, to build a financial system, people always want a 24-7 system.
And how you deal with people you interact with [with] It is in different geographical areas of the world without concentration?
And I’ve seen all sorts of ways people solve this problem, but never did […] Scalable solution. And use […] Honestly, cryptography and the proof of work to solve this problem is strange. This is totally strange to me. ”
All the other systems he designed and some of the systems he built are systems distributed around the world. However, unlike Bitcoin, although copies of these systems are distributed redundantly across the globe, these systems are allowed and restricted.
“In Bitcoin, you each do this kind of proof of work, and that’s the truth. [database] Write. That mess[ed] My head. That’s […] Very unique. ”
Start building
The roads Nicholas built in the space are organic. He was living in New York City at the time and was a developer, and of course, he found the original Bitdevs built in New York City. The gatherings were very small at the time, sometimes less than twelve people, so the environment was more conducive to in-depth conversations than some of the larger gatherings today.
He first started building “amateurs” for some people on the Over-Counter (OTC) trading software stack (at that time, a lot of bitcoin was used for cash or other Fiat media). Nicholas and Omar Shibli, who he met at Bitdevs, co-wrote the contract salary (BIP 175).
BIP 175 specifies a plan in which a good customer engagement address is provided by a merchant. This is done by two first agreed contracts to describe what is paid, after which the merchant sends the main key to the consumer, and they use the hash and the main public key to generate a single address using the hash and the main public key.
This enables the client to prove that the merchant agrees to sell their content and has paid for the goods or services. Simply publish the Master Public Key and Contract, and any third party can generate the paid address and verify that the appropriate funds have been sent here.
Ocean and pillars
Nicholas and Omar continue to build Bitcoin infrastructure company CommerceBlock. CommerceBlock adopts similar business approaches, such as building a technology platform to facilitate the overall use of Bitcoin and blockchain in business and finance. Shortly thereafter, Nicholas met Tom Trevethan who joined the ship.
“I met Tom, yes, a mutual friend, and I’m happy to say who it is. There is a guy named who, the new guy may not know who he is, but OGS, John Matonis. John Matonis is my good friend, [I’d] I met him for a while. He introduced me to Tom, you know, when it comes to passwords, he has more stuff. That starts from there. ”
The first major project they worked on was Ocean, a fork of the Sidechain element developed by Blockstream, the platform based on liquid Sidechain. The two companies worked with other companies to build an ocean-based Sidechain, which released the Gold Medal (DGLD), a gold-backed digital token in 2019.
“So we know that we are working on making the forks of the elements and making custom Sidechains. […] Tom had some ideas about cryptography. I think our first idea is how to pin the fork of these elements to […] Bitcoin main chain. […] We think the cleanest way is […] I don’t remember using some form, but what is it [based on] Single-use sealing kit, which was the invention of Peter Todd. And I think our implementation in the middle stage is pretty good. ”
The main difference between ocean and liquid as side chain platforms is the ocean-to-commercial board design protocol, called Mainstay. The pillar is a timestamp protocol that, unlike OpenTimestAmps, strictly orders the Merkle tree it builds instead of randomly adding items in any order it commits. This allows each sidechain time sweep, each timestamp puts its current block into the Mainchain Mainchain Minchain miner at each time.
Although this is useless to any bitcoin fixed in Sidechain, for real-world assets (RWA), it provides a singular history of ownership that even the federation that operates Sidechain cannot be changed. This removes the ambiguity of ownership during legal disputes.
Asked about the eventual closure of the project, Nicholas said:
“I don’t know if we’re early, but we have a few clients. But yeah, there’s not a lot of adoptions. I mean, Liquid isn’t surprising. And, you know, whenever we know clients to do POCs, we’re competing against other well-funded projects.
It shows that they either receive money from IBM and others, or from IBM or some big consulting firms and are promoting Hyperledger. Or the days when we will compete with EOS and Tezos. So because we are like a company that needs money to build prototypes or build-side technology, it’s very difficult. There weren’t many adoptions at that time. ”
Mercury wallet and mercury layer
After closing the ocean, Nicholas and Tom finally started to engage in the implementation of statistics, although the lead to this point is not straightforward.
“[T]These are some things that are causing this to happen at the same time. So we’re involved in these two things [proof of concept]a very small one […]POC is like a potential customer. But this bypasses cautious logging contracts. One of the challenges of cautious logarithmic contracts is that they are inefficient. So we hope there is a way to sign these contracts. It happens that Ruben Sampson has written a white paper/medium article about Statechains. and […] These two ideas, this problem may solve the problem of DLC. ”
Finally, instead of finally deploying a Statechain solution for managing DLCs, they went in a different direction.
Well, another thing happened at the same time, Coinswaps. And, yes, remember that in those days everyone was worried […] 2024/2025 […] The network costs can be high. And do […] Coin exchange, you want to do multiple rounds. so […] The national chain feels perfect because […] You basically take the UTXO, put it off the chain, and you can swap it as needed. ”
Mercury wallets are fully built and practical, but sadly never received adoption from any user. Samourai Wallet and Wasabi Wallet dominated the privacy furniture ecosystem at the time, and Mercury Wallet could never successfully bite the market.
Instead of giving up completely, they went back to the drawing board and built the statechain variant using Schnorr with the coordinator server blind signature, meaning it couldn’t see it signing. When asked why these changes were made, he said: “This will give us more flexibility to do other things with L2’s bitcoin. You know, when you have a blind solution, we think that this might start to be interoperable with Lightning.”
Instead of building users facing wallets this time, they built a software development kit (SDK) that can be integrated with other wallets.
” {…]I guess in the mercury layer, this is very established […] Full tier 2 that anyone can use. So we [built] It is an SDK. We do have a default wallet that people can run. But we hope others can integrate it. ”
Business ends
Finally, after years of outstanding engineering work, CommerceBlock closed the door. Nicholas and other members of the other team have built many well-designed systems and protocols, but in the end, they always seem to be one step ahead of the curve. This is not necessarily a good thing when building a system for end users.
If your work is too far from what users want, then ultimately this is not a sustainable strategy.
“…In the UK, from a regulatory perspective, that doesn’t do that. If I were living in Dubai, maybe that would be another matter. When we made the decision, you know, when we made this decision… things weren’t going well in the US. I think things have improved a bit. But I think I think Bitcoin is a good place economically. I think it’s a good choice. I think it’s a good choice. But, I think it’s a certain one, but I think it’s my product. Adoption.”
Asked why he thought people weren’t using tier 2 on a massive scale, he said: “…in my adventures in Civkit (A diversified market)one of the questions that always asks me is, when binding, when stablecoins? So when you’re working on a project that’s trying to promote Bitcoin in the Global South, but everyone you meet in the Global South wants stability, you start to wonder, OK, am I building the right tools? Do people even want to use it? ”
Ultimately, it still needs to adopt and use the most useful and reasonable engineering work, otherwise what value is in the first place?
“…Its wealth storage has changed over the past four years. I do think it’s a risk I think it’s one of the challenges of Bitcoin.
“I think there are a lot of smart people in Bitcoin that can build interesting things, but I think the focus now has to be on users.”
