Builder: Nicholas Gregory
Language (s): C ++, rust
Bring to (S/ED) to: Ocean Sidechain, Stain pillar, Mercury wallet, Mercury layer
Work (S/ED) on: Commercblock (formerly)
Prior to Bitcoin, Nicholas was a software developer who worked in the financial system for banking companies that developed trade and derivatives platforms. After the 2008 financial crisis, he began to consider alternatives to the Legacy Financial System in the Fallout.
Like many of that time, he ignored the original Slashdot article with the Bitcoin -White paper completely because of the apparent focus on Windows as an application platform (Nicholas was a Unix/Linux developer). Fortunately, someone he knew later introduced him to Bitcoin.
The thing that gained his interest about Bitcoin instead of other alternatives at that time was the specific architecture as a distributed computer network.
“The fact that it was like an alternative way. It was all based [a] kind […] network. And what I mean by building financial systems, people always wanted a system that was 24-7.
And how do you deal with someone who has interaction? [with] Is it in various geographical parts of the world without it being centralized?
And I had seen different ways in which people solve that problem, but it was never done, you know, in a kind of […] Scalable solution. And use […] Cryptography and proof of work to solve that problem was just strange to be honest. It was completely strange for me. “
All other systems he had designed, and some he built were systems that were spread over several parts of the world. In contrast to Bitcoin, however, these systems were permission and limited that could update the relevant database (s), despite the fact that copies of them were distributed excessively worldwide.
“The fact that in Bitcoin you had everyone who did this proof of work game, that’s what it is. And who wins does the [database] to write. Junk[ed] With my head. That was […] Very unique. “
Start building
The path of Nicholas to build in space was organic. At the time he lived in New York City, and as a developer he naturally found the original Bitdevs founded in NYC. At the time, encounters were incredibly small, sometimes even less than a dozen people, so the environment was much more conducive to in -depth conversations than some larger meetups nowadays.
He first started building a “hobbyist” without a prescription (OTC) Trade software pile for some people (then a very considerable volume of Bitcoin OTC was traded for cash or other Fiat -Media). From here, Nicholas and Omar Shibli, whom he met at Bitdevs, worked together on payment together (BIP 175).
BIP 175 indicates a schedule in which a customer who buys well participates in generating the address that the trader offers. This is done by the first two agreement on a contract describing for which payment is made, then the trader then sends a Master Public Key to the consumer, who uses the hash of that description of the item or the service to generate an individual address using the hash and master -by -visible key.
This enables the customer to prove what the trader has agreed to sell them and that the payment for the good or service has been made. By simply publishing the Master Public Key and contract, each third party can generate the address paid and check whether the correct amount has been sent there.
Ocean and support pillar
Nicholas and Omar continued to find commercblock, a Bitcoin infrastructure company. Commercblock followed a similar approach to the business community such as Blockstream, where technological platforms were built to facilitate the use of Bitcoin and Blockchains in general in trade and finance. Shortly thereafter, Nicholas met Tom Trevethan who came on board.
“I met Tom through, yes, a common friend, happy to say who it is. There is a man named, who, new people, probably don’t know who he is, but ogs doing, John Matonis. John Matonis was a good friend of mine, [I’d] Known to him for a while. He introduced me to Tom, who, you know, was quite more about the cryptography. And it went a bit from there. ‘
The first major project they were working was Ocean, a fork of the elements Sidechain platform developed by BlockStream on which the liquid Sidechain was based. The Coinshares and Blockchain companies, in collaboration with others in 2019, launched a sidechain based on the ocean to give DGLD, a digital token with gold.
“So we know, you worked on forks of elements and did customized sidechains. […] Tom had some ideas about cryptography. And I think one of our first ideas was about how they could shoot at these forks of elements […] The Bitcoin head chain. […] We thought the most beautiful way to do that was […] With the help of a kind of, I can’t remember it, but it was something [based on] Wrong sets for one -time use, which was an invention by Peter Todd. And I think we have implemented that reasonably well with the mainstay. “
The most important distinction between ocean and liquid as a lateral platform is the use of an ocean of a protocol designed in commercblock called Meubel. The mainstay is a time stamp protocol that, unlike Opentimestamps, strictly orders the Merkle Tree that he builds instead of adding random items in which order they are submitted. This allows each Sidechain to find its current Blockheight in the Bitcoin -Blockchain a block every time.
Although this is useless for every Bitcoin that is linked in the Sidechain, for regulated real world assets (RWA), this offers a unique history of ownership that even the federation that exploits the Sidechain cannot change. This removes ambiguity of ownership during legal disputes.
When he was asked about the end of the project, Nicholas had this to say:
“I don’t know if we were early, but we had a few customers. But it was, yes, there was not much adoption. I mean, Liquid didn’t do it great. And, you know, based in London/Europe, when we met customers to do POCs, we competed against other well -financed projects.
It shows how many years ago they had received money from people such as IBM or some of the major consultancy firms and promoting hyperledger. Or it was the days that we would compete against EOS and Tezos. So because we were a company that needed money to build prototypes or build sidechains, it made it a bit very difficult. And then there was not much adoption. “
Mercury wallet and mercury layer
After they had closed Ocean, Nicholas and Tom eventually started working on a Statechain implementation, although the path to this was not easy.
‘[T]Here a few things happened that went there at the same time. So the two things were that we were involved in one [proof of concept]a very small […]POC for a potential customer. But this rolled around discreet log contracts. And one of the challenges of discrete log contracts, they are very capital -efficient. So we wanted a way to Novegen those contracts. And it just happened that Ruben Sampson, you know, this kind of white paper/medium post wrote about Statechains. And […] Those two ideas, that kind of resolved potential that issue around DLCs. “
In the end they are not in the use of a Statechain solution for managing DLCs, but went in a different direction.
Well, something happened with at the same time, coinswaps. And yes, keep in mind, in those days everyone was worried about it […] 2024/2025 […] Network costs can be quite high. And to do […] Coin Swaps, you want to do a little more rounds. So […] State chains felt perfect because […] You actually take a Utxo, you turn it off the chain, and then you can exchange it as much as you want. “
Mercury wallet was fully structured and functional, but unfortunately never received a user acceptance. Samourai wallet and Wasabi wallet at the time dominated the ecosystem of the privacy tools and Mercury Wallet was never able to successfully remove a bite from the market.
Instead of completely giving up, they went back to the drawing table to build a Statechain variant using Schnorr with the coordinator server blind signing, which means that it could not see what the signed. When asked why those changes were made, he had this to say: “That would give us much more flexibility to do other things in Bitcoin with L2S. You know, the moment you have a blinded solution, we thought, well, this could start with lightning.”
Instead of building a wallet this time, they have built a software development kit (SDK) that can be integrated with other portfolios.
“{…]I think it was very sort of a kind of one with Mercury layer layer […] Full layer 2 that everyone could use. So we [built] it as an SDK. We had a standard wallet that people could run. But we hoped that other people would integrate it. “
The end of the trade
In the end, Commercblock closed its doors after many years of brilliant engineering work. Nicholas and the rest of the team built countless systems and protocols that were very well designed, but at the end of the day they always seemed to be a step ahead. That is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to building systems for end users.
If your work is too far ahead of users, then that is ultimately not a sustainable strategy.
“… are in the UK, which is not so good from a regulatory point of view, played in it. If I lived in Dubai, that might have been another conversation. You know, back, if we made that decision … things were not great in the US. Adoption.”
When asked why he thought people did not use a low 2s on a scale, he had this to say: “… in my adventures of working on Civkit (a decentralized marketplace)One of the questions that I was always asked is, when tether, when stablecoins? So if you are working on a project that tries to promote Bitcoin in Global South, but everyone you meet in the Global South wants stablecoins, you start asking yourself, well, do I build the right tool? Do people even want to use this? “
At the end of the day, the most usable and solid engineering work still has to be adopted and used, otherwise what is its value in the first place?
“… There has been a shift in the last four years to have a wealth shop. And I think this is a risk because I think that if people are currently using Bitcoin and the mempool was expensive, there will be stuck and the costs were high, there are plenty of clear people to build good L2s.
“I think there are many smart people in Bitcoin who can build interesting things, but I think the focus should now be users.”