SBF

Chapter 22The Vampire and the Unicorn

On August 23, 2020, a researcher who worked for The Block, a crypto news organization, posed a question on Twitter: What could the leading decentralized exchange, Uniswap, do if someone copied all of the code that ran it, made it a new website, and then gave a governance token to all its users?

The researcher's name was Larry Cermak. He concluded, “Sure it would be a shitty move, but a lot of people are pure profit driven.”

Hasu, another crypto researcher (a pseudonymous one) with something of a cult‐like following, replied, “This will absolutely happen.”

Cermak tweeted back, “I think so too.”

It did. It was kind of a whole thing. It also led to the first moment that SBF stepped into the role as a leader and problem solver in the larger crypto community, like I said he would at the end of Chapter 17.

Uniswap has already been described, but let me just emphasize one thing here: everyone who built the decentralized exchange could disappear tomorrow, and Uniswap would keep working as long as Ethereum kept running. It was a robot on the internet.

I cannot emphasize this point enough. We are all very accustomed to the idea of “companies,” these legal entities that run on people doing work. On Ethereum, people build simple little companies that run themselves forever. They are financial robots that don't have physical gears that run out or maintenance that needs doing. They can work for all time. Uniswap is like that.

Despite Uniswap's autonomous ...