Builder: Nicholas Gregory
Language (s): c ++, rust
Contribution (S/ED) To: Ocean SideChin, Mainstay, Mercury Wallet, Mercury Layer
Work (S/ED) at: Commerceblock (formerly)
Before Bitcoin, Nicholas was a software developer who worked in the financial system for banking companies that developed trading and derivative platforms. After the financial crisis in 2008, he began to consider alternatives to the older financial system in the fall.
Like many from that time, he completely ignored the original Slashdot article with Bitcoin WhitePaper because of the apparent focus on Windows as an application platform (Nicholas was a Unix/Linux developer). Fortunately, someone he knew he knew him to Bitcoin later.
What caught his interest in Bitcoin rather than other alternatives at the time was its specific architecture as a distributed computer network.
“The fact that it was like an alternative way. It all was based on [a] kind […] network. And what I mean by what builds financial systems, people would always have a system that was 24-7.
And how do you handle someone who interacts [with] That in different geographical parts of the world without being centralized?
And I had seen different ways of solving this problem but it had never been done, you know, in a kind […] Scalable solution. And user […] Cryptography and evidence of work to solve this question was just weird, to be honest. It was quite weird to me. “
All the other systems he had designed and some that he built were systems distributed over several parts of the world. However, unlike Bitcoin, these systems were allowed and limited who could update the relevant database (s) despite this fact that copies of them were superfluously distributed globally.
“The fact that in Bitcoin you had all kinds to make this evidence of work games, which is what it is. And the one who wins does [database] write. That mess[ed] With my head. It was […] Very unique. “
Starting to build
Nicholas’s road to building in space was an organic. At the time he lived in New York City, and when he was a developer, he naturally found the original Bitdevs founded in NYC. Back then, meetings were incredibly small, sometimes even less than a dozen people, so the environment was much more conducive to in -depth conversations than some major meetings these days.
He first began to build a “hobbyist” over Disk (OTC) trading software stacks for some people (at that time a very significant volume of Bitcoin OTC was traded for cash or other Fiat media). From here, Nicholas and Omar Shibli, whom he met in Bitdevs, worked together on wages for contract (Bip 175).
BIP 175 specifies a scheme in which a customer who buys a good one participates in generating the address that Merchant provides. This is done by the two who first agree on a contract that describes what is paid for, afterwards, sends the grocer a master’s public key to the consumer who uses hash of this description of the item or service to generate an individual address using hash and Master Public Key.
This allows the customer to prove what the merchant agreed to sell them and that the payment for the good or service has been made. Just publishing the Master’s public key and contract allows every third party to generate the address paid and verify that the appropriate amount of funds was sent there.
Sea and carry beam
Nicholas and Omar continued to find Commerceblock, a Bitcoin infrastructure company. Commerceblock took a similar approach to business as a blockstream, building technological platforms to facilitate the use of bitcoin and blockchains in general in trade and finance. Shortly after, Nicholas Met Tom Trevethan, who came on board.
“I met Tom via, yes, a mutual friend, glad to say who it is. There is a guy called who new people probably don’t know who he is but also does, John Matonis. John Matonis was a good friend of me, [I’d] Knew him for a while. He introduced me to Tom, who was, you know, kind of more on the cryptography side. And it went kind of from there. “
The first major project they were working on was Ocean, a fork of Elements SideChain Platform developed by Blockstream, on which the floating sidechain was based. Company CoinShares and Blockchain in partnership with others launched an Ocean -based side button in 2019 to issue DGLD, a gold -supported digital token.
“So we know we worked on forks of elements and made tailor -made sidecaters. […] Tom had some ideas about cryptography. And I think one of our first ideas was about how to bolt on these forks of items on […] Bitcoin -head chain. […] We thought the purest way of doing it was […] With the help of some sort I can’t remember it but it was something [based on] Simple use sealed sets which were an invention of Peter Todd. And I think we implemented it pretty well with the carrying beam. “
The biggest distinction between Ocean and Liquid as a SideChain Platform is Ocean’s use of a protocol designed on Commerceblock called Mainstay. MAINSTAY is a timestamp protocol which, unlike the Opentimestamp’s strictly ordering the Merkle tree, it is based on randomly adding objects in the order they are submitted in. This allows each SideChain to the timestamp its current blockheight for Bitcoin -blockchain -mines, as Mainchin Miners finds a block.
While this is useless for any bitcoin attached to the sidekin, for regulated assets in the real world (RWA), this provides a unambiguous history of ownership that the federation that drives SideChain cannot change. This removes the ambiguity of ownership under legal disputes.
When asked about eventually closing the project, Nicholas had this to say:
“I don’t know if we were early, but we had a couple of clients. But it was, yes, there wasn’t much adoption. I mean Liquid didn’t make amazing. And you know to be a resident of London/Europe every time we met clients to make POCs, we competed against other well -funded projects.
It shows how many years since they had either received money from people like IBM or some of the major consulting firms and promoted hyperledger. Or these were the days when we wanted to compete against EOS and TEZOS. So because we were like a company that needed money to build prototypes or build sidewalks, it made it very difficult. And then there wasn’t much adoption. “
Mercury Wallet and Mercury
After closing Ocean, Nicholas and Tom eventually began working on a Statechain implementation, although the path to this was not straightforward.
“[T]Here were a few things that happened at the same time that led to it. So the two things were that we were involved in a [proof of concept]A very small […]Poc for as a potential client. But this rolled around discreet log contracts. And one of the challenges of discreet log contracts, they are very capital effective. So we wanted a way to enjoy these contracts. And it just happened that Ruben Sampson, you know, wrote this kind of whitebook/medium post about Statchains. And […] These two ideas, the kind of resolved potentially the problem around DLCs. “
In the end, they did not end up implementing a Statechain solution for managing DLCs, but went in a different direction.
Well, another thing happened at the same time, coinswaps. And yes, remember, these days, everyone cared for that of […] 2024/2025 […] Network fees could be pretty high. And to do […] Coin swaps, you want to make more rounds. So […] State chains felt perfect because […] You basically take an UTXO, you put it from the chain and then you can swap it as much as you want. “
Mercury Wallet was fully built out and functional, but unfortunately has never received any user recording. Samorai Wallet and Wasabi designbook at that time dominated the ecosystem of privacy, and Mercury Wallet was never able to successfully take a bite out of the market.
Instead of completely giving up, they went back to the drawing board to build a StateChain variant using Schnorr with the coordinator server’s blind signature, which means it couldn’t see what it was signing. When asked why these changes were made, he had this to say, “It would give us much more flexibility to do other things in Bitcoin with L2S. You know the moment you have a blinded solution, we thought, yes, this could begin to have interoperability with lightning.”
Instead of building a user facing the wallet this time, they built a software development set (SDK) that could be integrated with other wallets.
“{…]I guess with mercury layers, it was a lot to build some sort […] Full layer 2 that anyone could use. So we [built] That like an SDK. We had a standard wallet that people could run. But we hoped other people would integrate it. “
The end of Commerceblock
In the end, Commerceblock closed his doors after years of brilliant technical work. Nicholas and the rest of the team built several systems and protocols that were very well constructed, but at the end of the day they always seemed to be one step ahead of the curve. It is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to building systems for end users.
If your work is too far ahead of the demand from users, it is eventually not a sustainable strategy.
“… Being in the UK, which is not doing that well from a regulatory point of view, played into it. If i was living in dubai, maybe that would have been a different conversation. You know, back when we made that decision… Things weren’t great in the US. Think… Bitcoin is in a good place financially.
When asked why he thought people did not use layers 2s in scale, he had this to say: “… in my adventures of working on civkit (a decentralized marketplace)One of the questions that was always asked for me is when tether when stableecoins? So when you are working on a project that tries to promote Bitcoin in the global south, but everyone you meet in the global south wants stablecoins, you start wondering, yes, do I build the right tool? Will people even use this? “
At the end of the day, the most useful and sound technical work still needs to be adopted and used, otherwise what is the value of it in the first place?
“… There has been a shift in the last four years for it to be a store of wealth. And I think it’s a risk because I think if people used Bitcoin right now and the Mempol was expensive, was jammed and fees were high, there are enough, there are probably bright people to build good L2. But they are not built because there is no demand.
“I think there are a lot of smart people in Bitcoin who can build interesting things, but I think the focus now should be users.”