In Pursuit of Privacy and Economic Prosperity – Andre Serrano
This post is on my decision to join Electric Coin Company, the company that supports development for the decentralized cryptocurrency Zcash, and reflections on my journey with NovaBlock Capital.
“Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.” — Edward Snowden, Permanent Record
In July 2017, I set off with my business partner and long-time friend Leeor Shimron to provide investment exposure to the emerging digital asset class. When I started Novablock, I couldn’t have imagined all the ways in which it would push me to grow both personally and professionally. In an Industry that is constantly evolving, it has required me to embrace the unknown and challenge myself in unique ways. As Jeff Dorman brilliantly summarized, “running a crypto fund is a lot like trying to build Uber while the car is being invented.” It combines functional knowledge of probably a dozen different disciplines, notwithstanding finance, capital markets, computer science, cryptography, game theory, and legal. As a result, it is one of the most intellectually stimulating areas of focus and it requires both a broad understanding of technical nuance and a high degree of emotional intelligence in order to parse through hype and make sound decisions.
This experience has provided me with opportunities to connect with investors, founders, and entrepreneurs around the world to better understand their vision for how the industry might evolve, and to reconcile that vision with my own. It’s as if this technological breakthrough ushered in a wave of brilliant and highly passionate people and offered them the tools and freedom to redesign the financial system from the ground up, without inefficiencies, opaqueness, or rent-seeking middlemen. I think many people here genuinely believe we have the opportunity to build a more equitable future, and that there is immense reward for those that are able to provide value at scale. I am confident that we have invested in companies that are building critical infrastructure for the digitization of finance and we may look back on their impact on capital markets similar to what Amazon has done to commerce.
Now I’m eager to build off the work with NovaBlock and apply these learnings in pursuit of a new opportunity. I am excited to announce as of October 21st, I will be starting as Business Development Manager at Electric Coin Company. I will be responsible for driving adoption of Zcash and managing global partnerships throughout the digital currency ecosystem. The ECC team has been a pioneering force in the industry since before the term “blockchain” even existed. Founded by Zooko Wilcox and a team of computer scientists at John Hopkins and MIT, ECC is on a mission to empower everyone with economic freedom and opportunity. I have previously written about Zcash’s innovative technology and financing model here.
Much of the world still suffers from lack of access to basic financial services. Despite global progress since the dawn of the twenty first century, it is estimated that 1.7 Billion adults are still without bank accounts (Forbes). Unsurprisingly, many of these people reside in emerging nations throughout Asia and Latin America. Blockchain offers the unprecedented opportunity to reach these citizens and increase their participation in the global financial system. Bitcoin initiated a world-wide movement that has highlighted many of the shortcomings of this antiquated system and motivated millions of people to improve upon it. I am increasingly bullish on Bitcoin as a global censorship-resistant store of value. But with its position as the market leader, the Bitcoin core developers are required to be conservative with how they approach new technology implementations. For good reason — there is literally hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. As a result, I believe perhaps the greatest challenge Bitcoin will face is how to reconcile the benefits of a public, immutable ledger with the realities of digital privacy.
As society transitions to digital, the threat of surveillance by governments and private corporations has become a reality. It happened slowly at first — quietly eroding every time we clicked ‘accept’ on the terms and conditions to grant permission for a centralized company to collect our data at will. But they have proven their ability to handle our data has been at best careless and at worst in violation of our civil liberties.
Zcash’s zero-knowledge technology may be the greatest known solution to digital privacy and blockchain scalability. The same way you shouldn’t trust a website to handle your private information without an SSL certificate, I believe users and regulators will demand strong encryption standards for our digital currency transactions. As I explained to my mother last weekend: imagine if Venmo didn’t have a private option and all transactions were public. That’s the Bitcoin blockchain. You may not mind sending ten dollars to a friend to pay for lunch, but would you want your rent, medical payments, and other transactions exposed to the general public? Most likely not. Furthermore, the significance of this technology is ultimately to provide greater choice and allow people to make the decision to disclose selective information, rather than have it defined for them.
I am incredibly optimistic about the future of distributed ledger technology and I am excited to have a more active role in shaping its outcome. I would like to give a special thanks to everyone that has joined me on this adventure so far — Leeor Shimron, Blake Richman, Jack Tatar, Ron Kochman, Brian Mahoney, and all of the friends, investors, and partners that we’ve met along the way. Thank you also to Josh Swihart, Zooko, and the Electric Coin team for this opportunity. If you are reading this and think you may have ideas of how to grow a decentralized ecosystem, or if you are working on an app or company that may be able to add utility to the Zcash blockchain — please don’t hesitate to reach out. My DMs are open.
Published at Mon, 21 Oct 2019 00:52:06 +0000
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