Joining Smart Transactions
As STXN continues its public rollout from years of semi-stealth R&D, I realize it’s also a bit of a personal debut. So feels right to come out and share a bit about myself and why I joined team Smart Transactions.
I’m Boris Mamlyuk. For the past twelve years, I served a tenured US law professor at the University of Memphis, School of Law. Prior to that, I held other appointments, served as a US Fulbright Fellow in Moscow, that sort of stuff. Resume fluff aside, my biggest intellectual feat was working through “digital gold” and “digital oil” chatter to become a Bitcoiner and Etherean.
If you need receipts, here you go:
This isn’t to flex about how long I’ve been in “the space.” The point is that I thought the blockchain revolution was so profound and important that I folded it into my traditional curriculum in 2013 and started testing my students on these currents. Particularly with respect to national security and international issues. Just read the receipt and compare with today’s trends. It wasn’t about me thinking this mattered, but making sure others knew how and why this mattered.
That same year I started @CleanApp in part from belief that Bitcoin’s proof-of-work needed a material value layer, lest it get captured by Bitcoin™ antagonists. A few years later, I was running Ethereum miner rigs in my law school office built from graphics cards donated by Nvidia. In 2018, I founded Crypto Law Review and deepened my pro bono contributions to blockchain.
So I’ve been crypto lawyering for a really long time, mostly behind the scenes. I care deeply about blockchain’s success not because my bags depend on it, lol, but because blockchain represents a much more secure and flourishing public cyberspace commons than the splintered, dysfunctional, GDPR-cookie-bannered caricature of the Internet we’ve been told to accept as inevitable.
Few Key Lessons
I’ve learned a lot about crypto and crypto law over the past decade. Three main themes are: (1) nobody knows what’s going on; (2) legal waiver is dangerous; (3) ape together strong.
1. Nobody Knows What’s Going On … means there isn’t one person or even one group of stakeholders within or outside blockchain that has a clearly-defined strategy for how everything will end up onchain. There’s a widely-shared and growing awareness that “everything onchain” is where the world’s headed, but the who, what, when, where, how questions remain open. This unstructured reality does not map well onto simplistic “us versus them” binaries (eg, crypto v. regulators, defi v. tradfi), but it is very emancipatory insofar as it foregrounds your individual agency and collective governance in the co-creation of the futures we’ll inhabit.
2. Legal Waiver is Dangerous … should be self-explanatory. Waiver is the voluntary relinquishment of known legal rights. Crypto natives (especially crypto lawyers) waive so many fundamental rights on a daily basis there ought to be crypto version of the Miranda warning that we all recite as a daily prayer to ward against more waiver. Waiver is dangerous and it’s very easy to fall into these traps, particularly when the waiver traps are laid by conniving opportunists and sophisticated adversaries. This doesn’t mean adversaries have some comprehensive evil gameplan for how “we’ll own nothing and be happy,” see #1 above, but they don’t need it if their subjects are voluntarily waiving rights bundle, after rights bundle, after rights bundle. Cumulative micro-waivers lead to complete bondage. All rights reserved.
3. Ape Together Strong is fundamentally important, but woefully under-appreciated. Whatever one’s chosen plane of analysis, blockchain game dynamics share striking parallels to classic prisoner’s dilemmas. Cooperation is the winning strategy; defecting is often self-harm. The only way to nudge people towards individual and collective optimal strategies is by raising collective awareness about the rules of the game, and the nested nature of game x within related games y, z, and so on. For all the talk about trustless networking and processes, ape together strong is about trusting fellow apes who are not only committed to doing the right thing, but who are committed to teaching fellow apes about winning strategies. Equally important, learning from fellow apes about winning strategies. And, most importantly, having the collective smarts to quickly shift strategies, as necessary.
Smart Transactions
Over the past few years, I’ve been lucky to deepen my ethperiential learning as part of a globally disbursed R&D collective — Lest — and, within Lest, a longstanding skunk works project by the name Smart Transactions. A few months ago, I joined Smart Transaction Corp. in a formal capacity as General Counsel, doing whatever it takes to scale blockchain legally and securely.
Working with Vlad Zamfir, Anuj Das Gupta, and a stellar interdisciplinary team, Smart Transactions is all about making Ethereum and multichain transaction easier, safer, and more useful. Over the coming weeks, months, and years we’ll share more about our past, present, and future.
For now, just asking for your patience and understanding as we walk the very delicate line of launching and scaling a public protocol alongside a US-based corporate body. Please like, follow, share if you think our journey is worthwhile.
Whatever your skillset, please get involved because (1) we can’t do it without your help, (2) legal waiver is dangerous, (3) ape together strong.
Learn more at docs.stxn.io.
