Bitcoin Builder exists for users

Builder: Nicholas Gregory

Language: C++, rust

Contribution (s/ed): Marine sidechain, mainstay, mercury wallet, mercury layer

Work (s/ed): commerceblock (previously)

Before Bitcoin, Nicholas was a software developer working in the financial system for banking companies to develop trading and derivatives platforms. After the 2008 financial crisis, he began to consider alternatives to the legacy financial system for fallout.

Like many since that era, he completely ignored the original Slashdot article featuring the Bitcoin white paper, as he has a clear focus on Windows as an application platform. Thankfully, someone he knew introduced him to Bitcoin later.

It was the specific architecture as a distributed computer network that captured his interest in Bitcoin, rather than the other options of the time.

“The fact that it seemed like an alternative. It was all based on (a) kind of (…) networks. And what that means is, by building a financial system, people always wanted a 24-7 system.

And how do you deal with someone who (interacts with) it in various geographical parts of the world without being centralized?

And I’ve seen different ways of people solving that problem, but it’s never been done with a kind of (…) scalable solution. And to be honest, using encryption and work proofs to solve that problem was odd. It was totally strange to me. ”

All the other systems he designed, and what he built, were systems distributed across multiple parts of the world. Unlike Bitcoin, however, these systems were allowed and restricted to those who could update the associated databases despite their copies being globally redundant.

“The fact is that everyone played this job proof game in Bitcoin, and that’s what it is.

Start building

Nicholas’ path to the building in space was organic. At the time he lived in New York City and was a developer, he founded the original Bitdeff, which was of course founded in New York. The meetups at the time were incredibly small, sometimes less than 12 people, so the environment was much more conducive to deeper conversations than some of the bigger meetups these days.

He first began building “lovers” on top of the counter (OTC) trading software stack for some people (at the time, a very significant amount of Bitcoin was being traded with cash or other Fiat media). From here, Nicholas and Omar Shibli, whom he met on Bitdevs, worked together on Pay to Contract (BIP 175).

BIP 175 specifies a scheme in which customers will appropriately participate in generating addresses provided by merchants. This is done by two people who initially agree to a contract explaining what is being paid. The merchant then uses the hash of that description of the item or service to send the master public key to the consumer who uses the hash and the master public key to generate individual addresses.

This allows the customer to prove that the merchant has agreed to sell and that the goods or services have been paid. Simply publishing the Master Public Key and the agreement, a third party can generate the address paid and make sure that the appropriate amount of funds have been sent there.

The ocean and main force

Nicholas and Omar found CommerceBlock, a Bitcoin infrastructure company. CommerceBlock has taken a similar approach to business as Blockstream, building a technology platform to promote the use of Bitcoin and blockchain in commerce and finance. Shortly afterwards, Nicholas met Tom Trevetan, who was on board.

“I met Tom Vere, yeah, I’m happy to say who it is. Maybe new people don’t know who he is, but Og is John Matnis, who was my good friend (I knew him).

The first major project they worked on was Ocean, a fork of the element sidechain platform developed by Blockstream, where liquid sidechain was based. The company collaborated with others to coin-share and blockchain, and launched an ocean-based sidechain in 2019 to issue DGLD, a digital token that supported gold.

“So, you know, we were working on forks of elements and doing bespoke sidechains, Peter Todd.

The main distinction between oceans and liquids as a Sidechain platform is the use of protocols designed with Commerceblock, known as Mainstay. The flagship is a timestamps protocol that, unlike Opentimestamps, strictly orders the Merkle tree to build, instead of randomly adding items in the order they are submitted. This allows each SideChain to have its current block height appearing on the Bitcoin blockchain.

This is useless in Bitcoin pinned to the sidechain, but in regulated real-world assets (RWA), this provides a singular history of ownership that is incapable of changing even in the federals that run sideshane. This removes ownership ambiguity during a legal dispute.

When asked about the final closure of the project, Nicholas said this:

“I don’t know if we were early, but we had a small number of clients. But yeah, there weren’t many adoptions, meaning Liquid wasn’t surprising.

It shows how many years ago they received money from people like IBM, or they were on some large consultants and promoted Hyper Redger. Or it was an era where we competed with EO and Tezos. So it became very difficult because we were like a company that needed money to build prototypes or to build sidechains. It wasn’t used much back then. ”

Mercury Wallet and Mercury Layer

After shutting down the ocean, Nicholas and Tom eventually began working on implementing status, but the road to this was not easy.

”

Ultimately, they never deployed a StateChain solution to manage the DLC, but they went in a different direction.

Well, something else was happening at the same time, Coinswaps. And, with all in mind, at the time, everyone was worried about (…) 2024/2025 (…) network fees being quite high. And to do (…) coin swap, I want to do multiple rounds. (…) I felt the condition chain was perfect. Because (…) you can basically take Utxo, remove it from the chain and replace it as much as you like. ”

The Mercury Wallet was fully built and functional, but sadly never won user adoption. At the time, Samourai wallets and wasabi wallets dominated the ecosystem of privacy tools, but Mercury wallets were unable to bite from the market.

Rather than giving up completely, they went back to the drawing board and built the Statechain variant using Schnorr using blind signatures from the coordinator server. When asked why these changes were made, he said this.

Instead of building wallet-facing users, we have built a software development kit (SDK) that can be integrated with other wallets.

“In the {…) Mercury layer, we were building a kind of (…) full-fledged Layer 2 that anyone could use, so we built it as an SDK. We had a default wallet that people could run.

The end of CommerceBlock

Eventually, CommerceBlock closed the door after years of great engineering work. Nicholas and the other teams built a number of very well-designed systems and protocols, but at the end of the day they always seemed a step ahead of the curve. It’s not necessarily a good thing when it comes to building a system aimed at end users.

If your job is far ahead of the demand from users, then it’s not a sustainable strategy in the end.

“… Being in the UK is not doing well from a regulatory standpoint, and playing all the way to it. If I had lived in Dubai, it would have been a different conversation. When we made that decision, you know… I think things have improved there. Adoption.”

He was saying this when asked why he thought people weren’t using Layer 2 on a large scale. (Divided market),One of the questions that always came to me is when it was tether, when it was stablecoins? When you’re working on a project that’s trying to promote Bitcoin in the Global South, and when everyone you meet in the Global South wants stubcoin, are you building the right tools? Do people want to use this? ”

At the end of the day, you should employ and use the most useful and healthy engineering tasks. Otherwise, what is its value in the first place?

“… There have been shifts to become a store of wealth over the past four years. And I think there are people who are bright enough to build a good L2 because people are using Bitcoin now and their members are expensive, packed and expensive, so I think that’s a risk. And I think that’s one of the challenges of Bitcoin right now.

“I think there are a lot of smart people in Bitcoin who can build interesting things, but now I think they have to be users.”