Nicola Greco

I am working to re-decentralize the webRead more about my work here. I am a researcher at Protocol Labs. PhD student (on leave) at MIT advised by Tim Berners-Lee and friend at Berkman Center. Once an entrepreneur, a UCL student, a Mozillian.

Before Tokens

July 24, 2017

From January, due to different reasons I had the incredible occasion to brainstorm and collaborate with some very great minds in the blockchain space.

A recurring question was: “How can we build a new cryptocurrency that offers a service?”. This gave me a lot to think about: decentralized file storage, distributed computation and more generically verifiable markets.

During the past 6 months, the word token was all over the place; as the months passed different groups worked on many of the ideas/implementations that others and I discussed - what of an exciting time to live in.

In this blogpost, I am leaving some of my notes taken during the month of January.

Dec 2016

During my Christmas vacation (Dec 2016) I started reading a Github issue that was circulating on a few chats/forum. This is the proposal for ERC20 (the proposed standard) for tokens that most (if not all) of the new tokens built on Ethereum are now using. I did not get to understand the details of the ERC20 until a month after. However, the story of tokens goes really much earlier than this, with the idea of Colored Coins.

During this month I collected the following notes on: “How to create new tokens?” without running your own blockchain.

Jan 2017

In my notes (sparse in github issues) I was writing the following categorizations, calling them “Metacoins”. Whether they are of any help today, I am not sure; friends and I found this categorization really helpful back then:

Note: off-chain, in-chain is relative to Ethereum:

- Nicola Greco,
Keep on rocking the decentralized web

Thanks for reading

  • Before Tokens Jul 24, 2017
  • Verifiable Markets on the blockchain Jun 21, 2017
  • Idea: Research Coin, second attempt Jun 10, 2017
  • Before Tokens - July 24, 2017 - Nicola