There’s a TL;DR on x.

Here’s the story behind what drove Christopher, Adrian, and I to build not one – but two novel protocols at the same time.

What motivated me to join the space, how I met my co-founders, what we built before, the origins and roots of Anoma’s vision, and why we decided to build Namada – regardless of the complexity of working on two architectures with one team.

How and why I joined this space

In 2016 I realized I could apply very simple machine learning to see what people were doing on Bitcoin.

I was finishing my grad studies in Copenhagen and working on a project for a data science class. This was the first time I dove deeply into how Bitcoin worked. It was cool, but I didn’t think too much about it.

At first, it was just a university project, but later it brought my co-authors and professors to collaborate on a research paper with Chainalysis. Back then, CA was a 20-person team, with Danish co-founders, Friday bars, and a pretty hygge vibe.

In 2017, I joined Chainalysis full-time. Hygge aside, I joined because I wanted to do machine learning and I thought that blockchain tech was cool because anyone could issue their own monetary policy – without asking the government for permission. The position at CA allowed me to do both: apply machine learning to real-world data and to keep learning about protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

At CA, my job was to analyze on-chain data and find out what people were doing on blockchains. This gave me a pretty rare skill: seeing what data is leaked, where, and for whom. At the time, I didn’t think this was a particularly useful ability outside of work.

Now I believe that I wouldn’t be who I am today without it – and neither would Anoma and Namada.

Hopping from one conference to another

In November 2017, Ethereum in its early years, I attended Devcon 3 in Cancún.

There I had the best conversations about consensus, early PoS designs, and scaling approaches (state channels, fraud proofs, plasma, sharding, a friendly ghost named Casper, etc.) – sitting on the floor of the conference hallway with strangers.

I was a complete noob, but the Ethereum community was incredibly welcoming to me. This was my first crypto conference.

Around this time, the Cosmos protocol was still under development. While many Ethereum folks went to Tulum to meet Elon Musk, I hung out with the early Cosmos team. I learnt that they were working on a novel Sybil mechanism for cooking steak and fixing the mess of someone called Byzantine who was at fault. Later, I realized that they were making serious efforts to advance from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, while pushing the boundaries of distributed systems with PBFT as an alternative to Nakamoto consensus. And things started to make more sense to me.

But what made me stick around the Cosmos team was that everyone was weird, fun, talented, and didn’t mind me tagging along even though I wasn’t part of the org. The steak was good too. As I spent more time with them, I learnt about the vision and was drawn to the idea of interoperability and sovereignty in financial systems. I was still at Chainalysis, but the thought of joining the Cosmos team did cross my mind.

In February 2018, me and two colleagues attended ETHDenver. Our job was to learn more about Ethereum, the ecosystem, and how much data we could get from existing tools like etherscan. ETHDenver was great. Old venue, rainbow colors everywhere, CryptoKitties just spun out of AxiomZen, four floors full of people younger and cooler than me, hacking with Solidity and OpenZeppelin.

I fomo’ed into the hackathon. I learnt Solidity in a couple of days with CryptoZombies and built RamenYa, an ERC721-based game where you could collaboratively craft ramen.

I didn’t even pass the first round of judging. Maybe I should’ve used the word NFT instead of ERC721 in the pitch deck. I was a bit salty at the time, but I didn’t regret participating. This was my first project in this space.

In late spring 2018, Chainalysis grew from ~20 to more than 100 people. While I was hopping from one crypto conference to the next one, I began to think about what I wanted to do in life. Machine learning/AI had +50 years of research and I was still just a beginner in the game. I could’ve devoted myself to it, but I decided to pursue the space of decentralized protocols because I believed that I could make a much bigger – and more meaningful impact. I didn’t care too much about cryptocurrencies, but the underlying technology had a real shot in bringing alternatives to existing systems.

In June 2018, I left Chainalysis. I started having more serious conversations about joining the Cosmos team. I was very excited and started to help out wherever I thought I could. But in the end, the position fell through. There was a lot going on in the org.

This was very rough for me.

How I met my co-founders

What really helped me was that I wasn’t once pushed away by the bad kids in the Cosmos team.

Cosmos wasn’t thinking about intents yet, but they did have a tent in the Berkeley office on Shattuck Avenue. Rumor says that there’s a token and that the tent is still there.

In summer 2018, proof-of-stake was still a theoretical concept, Cosmos had optimistic launch timelines and was seriously concerned about not having enough secure validators. And so, many bad kids decided to run their own validators, and I joined forces with two of them: Christopher and Adrian.

We bootstrapped our first project together: Cryptium Labs. I was the only one full time because Christopher and Adrian were busy shipping Cosmos.

Cryptium was fun, we built it to help the space in transitioning from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and by setting a good precedence with physical infra, governance, and community contributions. Cryptium became a sizable member of the early Tezos, Cosmos, Near, Solana, Polkadot, ... ecosystems.

But the number of validators rapidly grew between 2019 and 2020, there was no scarcity of validators anymore. We sold Cryptium to Chorus One in 2021.

Between 2018-2019 there were large advances in distributed systems (consensus, scaling) and cryptography (specifically zkps). We were protocol researchers and architects at heart, so even if I had to run Cryptium, Christopher had to ship IBC, and Adrian was helping Polkadot – we couldn’t ignore all the R&D that was happening. So in early 2019, we started Metastate.

Metastate was our second venture together. We started it with the belief that this space could benefit from a team capable of building and shipping protocols, and contributing to the research and development of distributed systems, cryptography, and compilers. Metastate shipped some (scaringly) major protocol upgrades to upgrade a live network via on-chain governance, did some research into ZKPs, and built a language, among other random but cool things.

Adrian and I were full time, Christopher hadn’t shipped IBC yet, and we grew Metastate to 15 people.

Forget blockchains, for a second

In summer 2020, we realized that protocol architecture was becoming stagnant. Tezos, Cosmos, Near, Solana, and Polkadot were all live. There were emerging protocols that improved on specific components – but every infra project was, in essence, yet another virtual machine.

None of them challenged the status quo like Ethereum did in 2013, in a Bitcoin-dominated world.

Christopher initiated a thought experiment: “Forget blockchains for a second, what do decentralized applications actually need?”.

Anoma was Christopher’s idea. He talks about his journey in this post.

In that hot DeFi summer in crypto and with no AC in Berlin, we started working on an architecture from first principles. One that was not blockchain-centric and that broke free from any existing constraints.

We didn’t have a name for it.

A coordination mechanism that scales

DeFi summer was peaking and I couldn’t care less about it. Some sushi-eating vampire attacked a unicorn and you could buy magic internet money, and yield more magical internet money. Sounds great, GLHF.

What inspired me about Christopher’s design and vision was that it can fundamentally change how people coordinate. It can not only solve hard problems in this space, but also hard problems in the real world that cannot be solved with web2 or traditional infrastructure.

Real world problems, like collective action problems (multipolar traps, public goods funding), lack of scalable mechanisms for democracies, and money failing as a coordination mechanism.

We’ve made a lot of progress. But there are still many unfulfilled promises that rooted the ethos of this space.

Undefining Money

The first version of the whitepaper focused on money and its limitations as a coordination mechanism. I came up with the tagline: undefining money.

Money, as a means to represent value, is unidimensional. It compresses complex real-world economic data from supply and demand into a single scalar – and this process comes with a loss of crucial information from the market, such as positive or negative externalities.

Other limitations include its susceptibility to capture by centralized organizations, like overreaching governments and paperclip-maximizing corps; and its lack of support for local sovereignty without compromising global scale and interoperability. And the most urgent limitation: lack of privacy – specifically, the ability for people to decide what data to share, when, with whom, and for what.

We bootstrapped the project, but we knew we needed help to turn the vision into reality. So we decided to fundraise. In fall 2020, Adrian reached out to Rob who we knew from the Cryptium days. Rob founded Polychain Labs around 2018 which was part of Polychain.

Still without a name, but with a cool tagline, I wrote a pitch deck in LaTeX. It was titled: “Project X: Undefining Money”.

Adrian pitched it to Polychain for the first time in October 2020. I wasn’t envious of Adrian, he had the toughest job among us. It was stressful, and we were terrible at explaining everything. But the vision of solving collective action problems and self-sovereign infrastructure resonated with Olaf. Polychain decided to lead the first round.

The nameless one

In February 2021 we pivoted Metastate to Heliax.

Heliax has a vision of its own: to build public goods. Not just infrastructure, but also vertically integrated products – so that the goods are accessible for as many people as possible. Today, Heliax has a team of 45.

Our vision was ambitious. Designing an architecture from first principles, as well as leveraging the frontier of research in distributed systems, cryptography, and compilers. We didn’t have all the answers and we needed the help of people smarter than us.

But we found a name…

…“Anoma” was an engineered name. It took us months to decide. There were many other options but we picked this one because: “A” as in anti/without, anti means “against” in Ancient Greek; “noma” was similar to “nomen” in Latin or “onoma” which means name in Greek.

Anoma sounded like “against a name”, “without a name” – and it resonated with us because of “anonymous”.

Feigenbaum

In November 2021, we announced Feigenbaum, Anoma’s first public testnet and Heliax’s first implementation of the Anoma protocol. Feigenbaum had validity predicates (now predicates), matchmaker nodes (now solvers), and an intent gossip layer – but it was not the right design.

Feigenbaum taught us that we needed more time to research, design, and specify Anoma. Heliax had grown, we had a great team, and a few components like the MASP and Ferveo were ready as libraries.

In early 2022 we forked Anoma’s rust codebase and started working on a new protocol. Also without a name.

Namada

In 2022, 6 years after Zcash launched and 4 years after I left Chainalysis, the space still needed an alternative to using centralized exchanges to control what data you reveal on blockchains.

A lot of things happened in summer 2022. In August, the three of us were at Zcon3. The word ZK was in every pitch deck, and yet the number of protocols that used ZK for data protection was decreasing. This motivated us even more to ship Namada.

Namada’s vision was and is to restore people’s ability to reveal their data on blockchains.

To achieve this, Namada is blockchain- and asset-agnostic, and brings Zcash-like data protection to any token which people wants to hold, use, or interact with – including NFTs.

Namada' is not just infrastructure, it’s also a vertically integrated app. This is because we need a practical way to help communities learn about data control and exercising data sovereignty. Namada’s shielded interactions are essentially a pre-step to information flow control (one of the key affordances of Anoma).

I’m excited about Namada’s launch. In 2022, it was just Heliax building Namada. The ecosystem and the community have grown a lot since then. Namada wouldn’t be where it is today without the help of amazing folks at Knowable, Informal Systems, BlackSky, and the growing community of builders, validators, and users who have been supporting Namada since 2022.

What makes the Namada protocol and community unique is the intersection between data protection, interoperability, and public goods funding – which are crucial to achieve Anoma’s vision.

The protocols are moving

15 years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin gave people the ability to create their own currencies without having to ask anyone for permission. In the early years of Bitcoin, people built novel applications other than cryptocurrencies, like ColoredCoins, Namecoin, and the Bitcoin Stock Exchange. Today, Bitcoin keeps moving towards the latest scaling designs.

8 years ago, Ethereum introduced a new paradigm of vm-centric protocols. A vm-centric protocol gives more properties for builders, spawning novel dApps which were possible, but clunky and not scalable to build on transaction-centric protocols. Novel dApps such as supply-side driven crowd funding, DAOs, non-fungible tokens, or automated market makers. Even today, the Ethereum ecosystem remains a Schelling point for the most radical application researchers. And the Ethereum protocol keeps moving, so that these applications can exist and grow without giving up on decentralization.

3 years ago, we published the first version of the Anoma whitepaper, introducing a new category of intent-centric protocols. An intent-centric protocol brings novel affordances for builders, such as information flow control or heterogeneous trust. An intent-centric architecture presents an alternative path to scaling: a path with intent-level composability and where decentralized applications and communities can reach global scale – without giving up on interoperability nor local sovereignty.

The protocols are moving. And they’re not moving alone.

To my dear reader

Thank you for reading my story until the end.

I am who I am today because of my journey with Christopher, Adrian, the beautiful humans and furry companions at Heliax – and many weird, fun, and talented people who I’ve met. Anoma’s design and implementation would not be where they are today without its coevolution with other protocols, ecosystems, and communities.

I hope this story can cheer you up whenever you feel sad or worried about this space losing its ethos. A lot of people come and go. But I’m still around and I’m not alone.

Don’t give up. Come find us sitting on the floor of the conference hallway.