TabooKey out of gas, donates IP to community

No startup CEO wants to shut down a company he invested so much in, both financially and emotionally. TabooKey was my baby for the last 2 years. Yet as I write these words I feel more grateful than regretful. I made the decision to not receive a salary at the beginning. Despite gaining nothing financially, I considered myself deeply privileged.

We put together the best crew I’ve ever worked with. Good human beings, not just passionate and brilliant work colleagues. People I’d want to work with for a lifetime. While pushing the boundaries of a crazy new frontier, we argued, laughed and shared stories. I came to appreciate them in all their idiosyncratic humanity. It was the greatest adventure story of my life so far. Like all good stories, it ended with an unexpected twist!

The bad news is that TabooKey, the VC-backed legal entity, has run out of gas and is shutting down. The good news is that:

1) There is active interest from key stakeholders in the Ethereum community in the open source projects TabooKey started and their development continues uninterrupted.

2) As individuals we plan on sticking around and continuing to contribute to the Ethereum community wherever we can add value, hopefully for many years to come.

3) By unanimous board decision the company released all its IP under free & open source licenses. Many thanks to our investors for actively supporting that decision. What usually happens to the IP of a startup that shuts down is a toxic legal limbo that nobody benefits from.

All creative works that could possibly have some value, educational or otherwise will be made freely available under free content and open source licenses. In a nutshell, that means anyone is welcome to freely learn from, use, distribute, modify, or otherwise benefit from all the stuff our startup created while it was in business. Not everything we created was very good, but there may be some hidden gems. We’re hoping they will eventually find their way into the decentralized systems of the future.

The best known open source project TabooKey started was GSN, the Ethereum Gas Station Network (GSN), a decentralized system of meta transaction relays that enabled gas-free interaction with Ethereum dapps. With the support of the community, the original team that created the first version of the GSN (Gas Station Network) is currently actively developing the next version of the system — GSN2. This is a group of people committed to seeing their first decentralized brainchild reach its full potential.

The GSN was originally designed as a component in the commercial system TabooKey was building. At some point we realized it was a missing piece of public infrastructure that could benefit the ecosystem. It didn’t make sense to cripple it with an unnecessary token, though that was all the rage at the time. We decided to polish up the code and release it separately as a non-profit contribution to the community.

I still think it was one of the best decisions we made, though in hindsight we did not realize what we were getting ourselves into. We reasoned that as an open source project we could share the cost of developing GSN with the Ethereum community. It would help establish the company’s credibility and double as good practice for launching a more complex decentralized system.

Little did we realize the gap between the initial code and getting a decentralized network all the way to production on mainnet. It was an exercise not only in developing software but also developing the social consensus without which a decentralized system is just a flesh-less skeleton.

The truth is that the launch of the first version of GSN to mainnet wouldn’t have been possible without all of the support GSN received as an open source project. We’re very grateful for that and would like to thank the Ethereum Foundation, OpenZeppelin, Consensys, and MakerDAO for the resource commitments that helped launch GSN to mainnet in August last year.

The GSN will happily outlive the company that created it. Isn’t that the real beauty of open source decentralized systems? They can be a lot more resilient than the fragile legal fiction of a startup. As far as we know the RelayHub smart contract at the heart of the GSN is happily ignorant of our new legal status as ex-TabooKey employees.

In fact, paradoxically the company’s demise has actually accelerated development of the GSN as an open source project. That’s the silver lining. As a VC-backed company it was hard to justify putting more resources into a public infrastructure project with no business model. Community grants are not a sustainable business model for VC-backed companies. VC-backed companies are designed to go big or go home and have the legal & accounting overhead to match. Open source projects suffer from none of these constraints. There is beauty in subtraction and a special kind of beauty in something that works better without profit.

There is much more to the story of TabooKey that remains untold, but I’m late for the first day of EthCC so that will have to be a story for another day.

Thanks to everyone who supported us all the way. Special thanks to my girlfriend whose love & wisdom helped me stay grounded and be my best self. “The universe suffers no waste.”