What You Missed From The Luke Stokes AMA
Luke Stokes is a crypto journeyman who entered the blockchain door by way of e-commerce. Stokes is co-founder of Foxycart, and it was an easy transition from there to the crypto trenches.
Stokes seems to have gone as far down the blockchain rabbithole as he could have. These days he’s the managing director for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability and interim executive director for the EOS Foundation. He’s a STEEM Witness, he launched a community-owned EOS block producer, and generally seems to sleep, eat, and breathe crypto.
Luke was our AMA guest on February 19. Here’s what we talked about.
The past week has been overwhelming for DeFi current events. Can you give us a rundown on how you experienced the past seven days of DeFi news?
The Tron Foundation buying Steemit Inc. was a lot. We were expecting Voice to launch on Valentine’s Day, then news of the acquisition came out of nowhere. We’re the block producers, so we’re typing furiously to our friends who work there and they say they’ll tell us about it when they can.
This acquisition stirred up serious drama in the Steemit user community. These people blog, they do videos, they make art, they’re not necessarily blockchain people. They’re coming at it from a place of “You’re messing with my blog, man.”
What role is interoperability going to play mainstreaming blockchain and cryptocurrency?
It’s such an important question. We talk about the analogy of the internet being around for years before HTTP was developed. Prior to that, it was “What is this good for?” I think the same applies here. Blockchain’s been around for ten years, it’s got these big crazy wallet addresses — what about just @lukestokes? Any blockchain, any cryptocurrency.
This is what we’ve been waiting for, We’ve got to make cryptocurrency easy to use because we have all these cool things we want to do with it. dApps and DeFi and DAOs — if it’s not simple for everyday people, it’s just not going to happen.
Why should anyone be paying attention to DAOs right now? What does that actually mean?
A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. People ask “what’s decentralized?”, it means it’s on a spectrum, it involves different opinions. There’s no single point of failure. They ask “what’s autonomous?”, it means you get a consistent, transparent, reproducible process. There’s no separate Enron books that no one knows about, this includes worker proposals and everything. A DAO is a group of people with a shared goal, it’s about understanding the value of pooling resources and passions to make something happen.
How should we think about multi-collateral versus single collateral stablecoins as we build and transact?
It comes down to your appetite for risk. I would hope to see multiple layers working. Maybe it doesn’t matter which one you’re using behind the scenes as long as it works and you’ve got enough backing for it. Do the research yourself, get into the communities, and decide if it’s something you can trust. It’s going to be interesting to see which of these financial technology products are sufficiently robust.
What are the biggest legal challenges associated with an EOS-backed stablecoin?
Unfortunately I’m not the qualified person to answer it, I’m not a lawyer. But I have thought that if we have sufficient decentralization, everything will be fine. But very smart lawyers have told me that’s actually not true. You do have to follow the law, you do have to be accountable. There’s going to be joint and separate liability.
Do you think Voice will be a hot dApp on EOS going forward?
I have a bias here, I’ve seen social media work in the blockchain space with Steem. I think Voice has a lot of potential, but I’m wary of any large company with a lot of funding thinking they can create community. Google+ failed, for example. With people getting de-platformed on Facebook and Twitter, the market is ripe for disruption.
Ultimately Dan Larimer is brilliant and underappreciated for what he’s done in the space, and they’ve got a solid team. The potential is there because of the financial backing and commitment. The time might be right, but I don’t have my invite yet.
Check out the full AMA here.
