Lounge S3: Designers

time for some /lounge talk, answering @cameron's prompts:
1. How did you discover Farcaster?

A few years ago I was publicly tweeting about a project I was working on, a decentralized alternative to discord (Howler) and the infra to serve it (Quilibrium). Varun saw my tweets, and sent me a DM.

weird internet kid. helping Creators with /seemore. yapping on /okbanger. curating in /creators and /cameron. dev + veteran + HBS. 
seemore.tv/cameron 🫡

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

I didn't realize it was going to be a recruiting call, but long story short, I ended up on Farcaster several months later (August) and in December, I joined the team working on the protocol alongside going all in on building Quilibrium.

2. Top 3 Career Highlights:
- Being a part of the Farcaster team
- Bringing MPC to millions of users in the Coinbase mobile app
- And of course, making Quilibrium a reality

Outside of the already entrenched crypto world, people tend to look unfavorably at the endless acronyms (PoW, NFT, ERC, KZG, BLS, ECDSA, ...) and many of those acronyms have taken on toxic baggage. Rather than pile on more of this we decided for our KZG ceremony to rename it in the spirit of "what are we trying to do?"

So we called it instead the "Declaration of Internet Independence". The goal of Quilibrium is to end the infestation of surveillance regimes on the Internet, getting participation in KZG ceremonies is hard: Ethereum had been running theirs for months and with sheer brand acknowledgement was in the tens of thousands.

The other thing was flexing our capabilities: EF chose to not do some hard things – make it work on mobile phones, for example. This was a strength of mine, so I made contribution work easily, on many platforms. Finally, I incorporated a reward component in the vouchers.

By the first month, we had more unique contributors to the ceremony than Ethereum had their entire duration up to that point. By the end of our ceremony, we had roughly double the contributions Ethereum had to theirs. All by changing a few words, the presentation, and the incentives. Same underlying math.

3. What are you currently working on?
Quilibrium and Farcaster.

4. How did you get your first 10 users? 
One of the hardest things in bootstrapping a decentralized protocol is getting people to even run the software, or participate in ceremonies that secure the network. We had incredible serendipity in our launch path