Founders

Sharing this internal "History of 0x" presentation in case it might be helpful for other web3 builders. It covers:

- Our almost 8 year voyage through the DEX idea maze, building on top of Ethereum.
- Our mission and motivations, failures and learnings.
- Historical context on crypto and the various Ethereum hype cycles.
- What’s allowed us to get where we are today: the dedication of our team, our mission and values, and persistence.

Happy to answer questions in this thread (if there are any).

Sharing this internal "History of 0x" presentation in case it might be helpful for other web3 builders. It covers:

- Our almost 8 year voyage through the DEX idea maze, building on top of Ethereum.
- Our mission and motivations, failures and learnings.
- Historical context on crypto and the various Ethereum hype cycles.
- What’s allowed us to get where we are today: the dedication of our team, our mission and values, and persistence.

Happy to answer questions in this thread (if there are any).

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-09UIf-C7EbEEEEShRwZtepgV2o0VvephA5GZ_2JsoY/edit?usp=sharing

0x was my first big love on ethereum and the first project i ever wrote about in crypto (https://medium.com/@pseudoanon/0x-protocol-an-overview-aa29ecb618da)

Congrats on all of your success over the years. Almost a decade at it is admirable. 

My one q would be: in hindsight, what were obvious mistakes re: tokenizing governance (if any)? Biggest lessons on that front?

(1/2) 

Wow, didn't realize it was you Germán. Thank you for being part of the early journey. 

The early Ethereum community had a lot of missionaries and technologists focused on building cool stuff. Positive sum thinking permeated the space. Crypto was no/low status so it was just people that were genuinely enamored with the tech and potential use cases. In that backdrop, community governance felt like a more logical and realistic thing to achieve. 

As massive amounts of capital and attention flooded in, the web3 space became pvp and zero sum, which isn't conducive to community governance. Now every good idea has been forked dozens of times over, there's way too many things to govern and a shortage of competent / engaged people to govern them. 

The tension between web2 platforms and apps continues to exist in web3.

co-founder at fairmint.com.
If you're a FF (Farcaster Founder) raising funds, stop right here and checkout fairmint.com. Or DC me :)

As with everything, there are pros and cons.

One of the major benefits is that it allowed us to spread awareness of our mission and vision, which resonated with many people.

Cons
- Can't control who owns it or their expectations. There's a good reason why entrepreneurs are careful about who they let on their cap table.
- Market value is 100% decoupled from value creation and doesn't reflect material progress over time. 
- Difficult to stick to a consistent team comp policy when the market swings wildly for no apparent reason.
- Token holder motivations and time horizons aren't conducive to R&D or innovation.

In retrospect, did launching a token ended up being more a hurdle or a blessing? I guess that the mere fact that it gave the team enough runway to iterate over the years means it definitely was net positive but I am curious to know what's your take on it.

Thanks for sharing. As someone who worked at a competitor way back in 2018 it’s cool to see this perspective.

Yep, you can find our open roles here: 0x.org/careers

Lover of art and all things crypto 
Web 3 girl | her

great deck. amazing to see the progress you've made over the years.


why hasn't tokenization of real world assets taken off? have there not been enough experiments?

Risk @Stripe prev: wallets @bitski, search @airbnb | https://www.castsense.xyz/ 

It may not be the most novel example, but I'd argue that USDC has taken off and delivers real utility to people internationally and in the US.

More generally, the early use cases to find PMF in web3 have all been (1) tokenizing some form of value (2) uniquely enabled by the tech (3) targeting crypto natives before finding wider appeal.

There have been solid attempts at tokenizing real estate and such, but you have to build for the crypto natives first IMO