Hello Foxes!
We’re beginning our relationship together as a decentralized community.
ShapeShift as a DAO is a new phenomenon, and it will take me some time to learn how to best to communicate and engage with this structure. Today is simply a greeting.
My name is Beorn, and I also go by Erik Voorhees. I’m the founder and have been CEO of ShapeShift. I’m @ErikVoorhees
- on Twitter, and my tagline there is the simplest way to know me: “toward peace, markets, and Bitcoin.” I’m a Bitcoiner at heart, and I embrace everything that advances the principles upon which it was created: openness, decentralization, and immutability, particularly in the realm of finance.
“Beorn” originated at the dawn of ShapeShift, before it was even a company. Back in early 2014, I launched the project pseudonymously. It wasn’t until mid-2015 that I decided to dox myself.
I always went by Beorn on our corporate Slack, and now that we are opening up ShapeShift to the world, it seems fitting to carry on that moniker.
As the ShapeShift corporate entity winds down over the coming months, my formal role as CEO of that entity will come to an end. As we develop into a DAO, I hope to evolve my role into “one leader among many.”
For over seven years, through a great many successes and challenges, I have been committed to building ShapeShift. In our new form, regardless of title, this remains my focus. Beyond my ideological hopes and dreams, I hold roughly 5% of the FOX tokens, which unlock to me linearly over the next three years (all ShapeShift investors and employees received token grants and share this 3-yr structure). Economically, and ideologically, ShapeShift means a lot to me.
The best projects have a clear purpose. We’ll start this next chapter by affirming ours:
We envision a borderless financial system built on open, decentralized protocols.
- We shall be the pathway into this borderless financial system; an open-source, multi-chain, self-custody crypto platform enabling billions to achieve financial sovereignty.
This is why we are here, to build an open-source, multi-chain, self-custody crypto platform for the world.
Amazingly, no such product exists today. This is our opportunity and our commitment. We aren’t starting from scratch; the ShapeShift platform and its underlying technology has been built over years by some of the most talented software engineers in this space. For the next few months, their focus is open-sourcing this technology such that the community can begin building onto it.
Our announcement on July 14th 2021 was that ShapeShift has begun its transition from a closed-source, equity-based company to an open-source, token-based community, and is doing so in order to best achieve its vision.
All of you are invited to be part of this now. We ask for openness, thoughtful discourse, and sincere engagement. We’re all pioneering something new here, and something very important.
In liberty,
Beorn