Jeff Garzik - Early Days Adopter and Trailblazer
Being in the spotlight for uncommon ideas is something Jeff Garzik is familiar with. Considering he is among the pocketful of core developers of the Bitcoin Blockchain (before it became popular) and also a proponent of a cross-blockchain project.
Jeff happens to be a controversial figure in the blockchain and crypto space. Perhaps not surprising since his ideas and thoughts are always radical.
United Bitcoin Rises from SegWit2x Ashes
Following the call off and failure in implementing the SegWit2x protocol, a bitcoin fork was announced a few months later. United Bitcoin, the name of the newly forked coin, has Jeff Garzik as Board member and Chief Scientist.
Okay. So, now what? Well, let's do a quick recap of the previous year. 2017 will be remembered as a year the crypto community witnessed lots of infighting among developers of the most popular cryptocurrency: Bitcoin. These heated verbal battles, of course, sometimes resulted in forks and fragments of the bitcoin blockchain. That's why we have Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and other fragmented sets of protocols breaking away from Bitcoin.
Although the 2017 proposed SegWit2x was called off, Jeff Garzik never took that as defeat. He has already concluded plans to rewrite the SegWit2x codebase in a way that promotes interoperability between the increasingly fragmented set of bitcoin protocols. According to Jeff:
"I hope that bringing multiple chains together in one software will, in some small way, bring multiple developers from multiple communities back together."Interesting fact about this is that the original SegWit2x was never aimed at promoting unity, rather the opposite. That was the reason most businesses and miners gave their support anyway. It's thus a welcome development that Jeff is turning things around.
Bloq - A Cross-Blockchain Protocol
Taking a cue from his plans to rewrite the SegWit2x codebase, Jeff Garzik intends to take its application beyond cryptocurrencies. This birthed his startup bloq, a company which will use a cross-blockchain protocol to bridge between the corporate and open-source worlds. Development of the new codebase will be open to any interested developers and will not be a closed circle.According to Garzik, developing the new codebase an open source code is beneficial to Bloq and its enterprise customers. This is because of the buggy fragmented protocols (forked from bitcoin) caused by the limited number of developers working on different platforms for various cryptocurrencies. Jeff Garzik is convinced that the solution to this is developing open source code for a single blockchain that supports development of several cryptocurrencies simultaneously.
Tokenization, which is an important phenomenon in the development and maintenance of any public blockchain, has prompted Jeff Garzik and his Co-Founder Matt Roszak to also launch Metronome (MTN), intended to be a cross-blockchain cryptocurrency. They claim MTN to be a Red Hat inspired project. Jeff had worked at Red Hat, a Linux subsidiary for more than a decade.
MTN will be able to move across different blockchains. It will be a very nimble and mobile cryptocurrency. 10 million MTN were auctioned in December last year, with 20% of that reserved for pioneer companies and developers. 2880 new MTN coins are added every 24 hours, with multi-payments allowed.
While this could be labelled an ambitious project, it does not obscure the fact that interoperability of coins is longed for in the crypto community. Jeff Garzik might just be the one to facilitate a "multi-coin universe" that is “multi-token” and “multi-network.”
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