✨Some personal news✨

After 5.5 transformative years at ConsenSys, I’m leaving to join Mirror.xyz as their first marketer. Here are some reflections on 2018 Consensys for those who still confuse it with CoinDesk’s Consensus.

Amanda Cassatt hired me to lead PR with Kara Miley. As a “venture production studio,” we helped Ethereum startup projects go-to-market. Mainstream journalists were also beginning to take notice of Ethereum and would email us daily asking simple questions like, “What is Ethereum and what can it be used for?”

On my second day I quietly annotated an interview between Joe Lubin and Nick Paumgarten, who shadowed folks in the Ethereum world for a year to eventually write this wonderful explainer.

By January 2018, Steven Johnson wrote the most compelling description of web3 for the New York Times Magazine that I still send to people.

As Ethereum continued to go mainstream, 49 Bogart in Bushwick was always bustling and we quickly outgrew our single studio. The joke was, if you had an idea for an Ethereum app, you could literally come in off the street and ask marketing to help you name your spoke. ** **

Back then, the organization of ConsenSys was meant to mirror the structure of the tech we were building (aka Conway’s law).

This meant that people could come up with their own titles, Ashoka’s Chief Anarchy Office or Joe’s “Flounder in Chief” were personal favorites.

As someone who previously worked in gov relations, I was insecure about being “non-technical” in such an engineering-dominant field. I subscribe to Amanda’s take in her Web3 Marketing book: engineers close to the protocols were weary of marketing Ethereum.

I sense this discomfort in revisiting my own writing from ETH Berlin in 2018. My justification for sitting through presentations on bonding curves and Casper at the time was that some body needed to test apps and submit transactions for Ethereum to someday be useful.

But if it wasn’t for ConsenSys, I truly believe that we wouldn’t nearly be as far along in making web3 useful, despite it being so different than we first imagined. Take the first Brooklyn Ethereal conference. We got a lotta flack for inviting Deepak Chopra, but before Ethereal, crypto was mostly the domain of right-wing listservs and buying drugs on the darknet (no judgment, just saying).

At Ethereal, we were using Ethereum to track tuna from Fiji to Brooklyn. Beatriz Ramos spoke about Dada.nyc, a collective art project for the internet (and was the brilliant mind behind my favorite Radiohead music video). We auctioned NFTs...in 2018.

The premier of Bermuda, Edward David Burt, literally signed an MOU at a Knockdown Center bar. Ronny Chieng roasted Joe Lubin and the rest of us nerds in the crowd for speaking about open-source software as if we were a cult.

Surveying some of the 47 projects ConsenSys was incubating in 2018, it’s incredible how essentially every consumer or industry application folded or pivoted, while nearly everything related to building out the core Ethereum developer infrastructure remained.

Grid+ stopped working on distributed energy markets after realizing they still needed better hardware wallets. Gnosis left prediction markets (regulatory foresight?) for multi-sigs in Safe. Ujo was supplanted by many other web3 music sites. OpenLaw OGs built Flamingo DAO.

MetaMask, Infura, Diligence, Truffle, and our protocols teams now building Linea, remain.

I’m not going to wade deep into the debate around whether we should be investing more in infrastructure or in applications, because like most things, they aren't necessarily in conflict, but a duality.

I remember trying to use Ethereum in 2018 when the Kitties were clogging the network. We needed the rollups we now have. But even if we had scalability in 2018, I wasn't doing much more than playing Dice2Win, a literal gambling game, and sending DAI to friends for dinner.

One thing that I will miss most about ConsenSys is a tradition started by Avery (please read this), where we would begin Thursday meetings with a warm-up to get creativity flowing.

Sometimes we would discuss white paper, or DeFi exploits, or an EIP debate. Some warm-ups would touch on phenomenology, history, law, or contemporary art. Inevitably, a connection could be drawn to web3, which shows just how singularly interesting the problems we're solving are. I compiled 30 ideas and quotes from warm-ups over the years here if you're interested in reading more.

I'm excited to share more of these thoughts outside of the zoom rooms and slack hallways at ConsenSys on jamesbeck.mirror.xyz (subscribe plebes!)

I think I'll always be bullish on Joe, Dan Finlay, E.G. Galano, Gonçalo, and many other OGs that remain at ConsenSys. While progress can seem slow, we've actually come so far since 2017. Just check the chain.