The word genesis undoubtedly occupies a special place in my heart for its satisfying phonetic, the first block of a blockchain, and the Justice visionary track. I can't believe they named an entire book of the Bible after it. Genesis sounds grandiloquent, a lofty style to narrate the early days of a project that only ever got used by a handful of errant knights, but I weigh my words thoughtfully: Factchain could've been the project of the next decade. It still can. I'm writing to figure out what is going wrong, suggest ideas to improve the model, and leave enough material publically for anyone to take up the torch.
The Pope is dope
At Ledger, I participated in developing features to transition the enterprise’s offering from a bare crypto Vault with an integrated orchestration framework into an entire web3 platform with activable DeFi and NFT use cases. Amongst other things, I worked on Ethereum smart contracts interaction and deployment, Ethereum message signatures, and DApps integration. I was implementing the product strategy of X1, who I introduced in yesterday's post, working under the technical authority of X2, a seasoned software architect. I have always admired X2’s technical skills and learned a lot from him. He could come up with a simple, intelligible solution to a wide variety of problems. Anyone who worked with him would speak highly about their collaboration: X2 was kind, humble, and always available to help when challenging issues arose. X1 was a close friend of mine, but my relationship with X2 never exceeded the professional domain. Both did not live in Paris. X1 used to come to the office twice a week. It was always the funniest day. At that time, I'd do anything to please and care for him. If he or a member of his family was sick, I would call my older neurologist's sister for her opinion. If he was late at the office, I would pick him up with my dad's BMW 1200 GT. If he needed a temporary shelter, my apartment was always open.
Rapidly, my entrepreneurial instinct triggered the ambition to found a venture with X1. I thought he'd be the perfect co-founder: very few people have a vision and even fewer are my colleagues. None of them are my friends. I was continuously trying to look for business ideas in the crypto sphere. The AI-generated picture of the Balenciaga Pope that tricked the entire internet sets the tone: how to leverage crypto to authenticate media and combat misinformation? This question has all the ingredients for a riveting story. Misinformation is a threat to the fabric of our digital society. The solution will be technically fascinating. Business potential is unlimited. With the rise of AI, the timing was perfect. AI creates abundance; Blockchain will preserve scarcity. I wanted X1 to start obsessively thinking about the problem. I opened a Notion space, ridiculously named it "Sourth" after the contraction of Source and Truth, invited him to it, and started doing market research on the existing solutions. I read all the C2PA specifications to understand why this standard was never broadly adopted despite the support of powerful companies. Every lunch with X1 was an opportunity to convince him to build something together. Eventually, it worked out. One day, X1 came to my desk with a solution draft: a SaaS for creators to authenticate their media onchain in a web2 fashion, abstracting away all the complexity of blockchain. Social networks would check for authenticated media through a simple API call and display warnings accordingly.
One, Two, Three, GO!
X1 and I always had an asymmetrical relationship. I placed him far above his absolute worth, and he put me far behind mine. I thought it was the price to pay to maximize the chance of success of this project, and I thought I'd be able to endure it forever. I was wrong in both instances. It's usually wrong to idealize people. There is no hero. I learnt it the hard way.
The more we thought about Factchain Media, the more obstacles appeared. How do you convince content creators to upload to the platform? Social networks and publishers would be even more complex to onboard. On a warm summer day, while hiking in "Les Calanques de Marseille," I received a phone call from X1. He introduced me to the fundamentals of Factchain Community. I thought it would be a great GTM (Go To Market) strategy: leverage the power of a community of fact-checkers to launch our authentication SaaS. The call came before Vitalik’s article on community notes by a few weeks. Not a lot of people can precede Vitalik's intuition.
X1 wanted to start the adventure with someone of "his seniority,” and Factchain Community is a complex system. We onboarded X2 and started thinking about an implementation. It will be a side project for X1 and X2. They both quit Ledger for a full-time contractor job in extremely demanding environments. On my side, I quit Ledger to work full-time on Factchain. I had to learn Solidity to program the smart contracts. I will probably dedicate some more technical posts on Solidity and the EVM. It was an immersive experience, and I want to keep writing code that runs onchain.
From that day, I embarked on an entrepreneurial adventure with X1 and X2. I set myself the goal to get Factchain off the ground and make them come on board full-time.
To be continued. (1/3)
