Researching Ryoshi

Hello everybody,

Well I am glad that my research was right! I still, however, wanted to do more digging. Just because Mr O’Modulus is Ryoshi doesn’t mean the story is finished. Ryoshi is the idea but who is the man? People may not think it is important but whilst attempting to uncover the truth it led me to realise that potentially this story goes back even further than Shiba Inu’s creation in August 2020.

Vitaliks Cultel

I saw it shared multiple times before I looked into it properly but the below tweet was shared and commented on a lot by CULT members after it took off.

In my opinion, and the reason I skipped over it so many times, was that it barely counted as a coincidence to me. Vitalik, like any person who is on twitter for a long time, will end up saying/typing the majority of words in a language.

I only came back to it yesterday after the below tweet was responded to by Mr’O and it reminded me of it.

For anybody that doesn’t remember, this was a song that went:

“I have a pen, I have a apple, UH apple-pen”

Which is most likely what Vitalik was referring to. This is odd because this “internet sensation” was from 2016. Vitalik referenced it in 2020, very late to the party, and then Mr O recognised it again, 6 years on from release in 2022.

Again, slightly more of a coincidence, but developers tend to be strange and I’m sure Mr O & Vitalik would have similar humour if they are both cut from similar cloths.

I thought a lot of people might have searched for the word CULT to try and find links so thought I would search for the word cartel instead which is where this all got interesting.

Guardian Cartel

I unfortunately didn’t find the word cartel referenced once in @wearecultdao & @mromodulus ‘s tweets. But where I did find a cartel was in who Mr O was following.

“🌶MetaCartel DAO is a non-profit DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) that aims to fund and support projects that are looking to advance usability, UX or further experiment with new Web 3.0 use cases.

We built this DAO with the motivation of attracting crypto’s most motivated and devoted dapp developers — and ultimately, backing them to succeed.

From grants funding, recruiting, community development to even memes. MetaCartel wants to put the full weight of the Web 3.0 community behind the creators and makers that are willing to put their own time and skin in the game to drive forward the future of decentralized applications.

We believe in the hacker hobbyist spirit. We believe in those who are working on dapps in their spare time. We believe in the nights and the weekends spent hacking. We believe in those who have skin in the game and are dedicating their entire career towards making DApps happen.

MetaCartel🌶 believes. This DAO is just the beginning.”

As you can imagine, I thought, oh shit I’m onto something here. So I looked in more detail and it appears that MetaCartel gives grants, and you have MetaCartel Ventures that invests for profit.

“MetaCartel began in 2018 as a technical working group to solve cryptoeconomic problems around meta transactions, the ability to interact with dApps without needing to use ETH. A key breakthrough was discovered and led to the creation of the Gas Station Network which was eventually spun out from the project. Afterwards, MetaCartel became an ecosystem grant fund to drive experimentation around use-cases for the Ethereum application layer. They garnered support from over 800 community members raising 1,100 ETH which was deployed to a variety of projects. While relatively successful, there were questions around the original MetaCartel’s sustainability as it was funded through the goodwill of its members who were unable to participate in the upside of the funded projects’ success. To create a more sustainable model, the DAO had to evolve into a venture capital fund where investments could be made which could produce returns for investors. With that in mind, MetaCartel Ventures was created as a Delaware Limited Liability Company (LLC) tightly coupled with Moloch DAO v2 smart contracts and incubated by SpankHouse to further the development of the Ethereum application layer.

The original members consist of people with deep ties in the Ethereum community as founders and investors. They will be contributing initial capital and will act as managers of the fund to source, diligence, propose and vote on investments. Known as Mages, these members are required to continually participate in managerial responsibilities or risk being expelled to the lower level for inactivity. The lower tier are known as Goblins and can contribute capital without exercising managerial rights. They can be thought of as Limited Partners (LP) in the fund while Mages are akin General Partners (GP), and both are free to move between the two groups. A third group known as Summoners are not necessarily members of the DAO but perform legal, financial and coordination tasks supervised by mages and paid through negotiable fees.”

Now you can see below some of the “mages” of Metacartel are people who are not short on cash/crypto…

I then saw this tweet from @wearecultdao this morning which spurred me to write this whole thing into a medium piece.

“But they, one day, realize that they’re already rich. And the work ahead is damn hard.”

Low and behold after searching who Metacartel follows on twitter I found the below Guardians or OG airdrop Guardians;

@auryn_macmillan

@JesseGrushack

@provenauthority

@IRLart__

@META_DREAMER

@sina_eth

@cleanunicron

@trentmc0

@Guz_MassAdopt

@gutomartino

@abv_avg_joe

@deepcryptodive

@androolloyd

At this point, after the initial rush from thinking I’ve figured it all out, I actually felt quite guilty and sad for Mr O. If the above is all correct then he has been trying for years and years to make the world a better place, but having people lose interest in, or taking over and warping his vision.

At first with moloch & MetaCartel, where it appears people became too busy and/or too rich to continue in a meaningful way, and then again with Shiba after attempting to allow it to be fully community governed with no instruction.

Third time lucky?

Moloch DAO was created by Ameen Soleimani, who David Hoffman ( @trustlessstate ) apparently asked if he was behind Cult DAO, and he said he loved the idea, but denied being behind it. It is not clear if Mr O is or was a Mage of MetaCartel, is Vitalik, or is @ryoshiresearch. Or all three or multiple.

But there is absolutely no denying that whoever Mr O is, he is definitely an extremely powerful force in Ethereum and has been for longer than anybody has realised.