With the help of Derek Robertson

A legal battle over software infrastructure behind much of the crypto activity is heating up with a new ruling from the Swiss court. The fight pits billionaire Joe Lubin, considered the de facto co-founder of Ethereum, against a group of his former employees at ConsenSys AG, a company that was instrumental in the development of the second-oldest blockchain network.

While on one level the lawsuit amounts to a dispute over corporate governance and the value of some key assets, it can also be seen as symbolic of a larger, world-shaping question that crypto and Web3 evangelists expect. Build: Should Blockchain Systems Be Adopted by Existing Corporations? and governance structures, or maximize your independence from them?

In the world of cryptocurrency, a more pragmatic and business-minded field sees the involvement of major banks and government agencies as a validation of the technology and a prerequisite for reaching its potential. Crypto purists, on the other hand, are wary of headlines and see their arrival as a threat to the original promise of blockchain, for example by collecting user data or enforcing government regulations that purists consider unfair.

The latest ruling widens a dispute that has divided a major group of cryptocurrency pioneers.

Former ConsenSys employees, who are also minority shareholders in the company, allege that it improperly transferred some key assets to a separate entity now owned by Lubin and a who’s-who of major investors, including JP Morgan, Microsoft, Softbank and Temasek. , state owned by Singapore. .

Those assets include MetaMask, a popular crypto wallet, and Infura, a suite of software tools for blockchain developers, meaning those tools are now owned by a company backed by major financial powerhouses.

In March, minority shareholders submitted a request for a special audit. Shortly thereafter, he sued to have shareholders retroactively vote on the transfer. Last month, a judge in the Swiss canton of Zug granted the former employees’ demand that shareholders vote in a previously unreported decision.

For the suitors, victory is purely tactical. Since Lubin himself owns the majority of the shares in ConsenSys AG, the vote is expected to ratify the transfer. But the decision paves the way for more legal wrangling, as the vote would produce a shareholder resolution that could be challenged in court, allowing minority shareholders to argue the content of their legal challenge: that Lubin’s interest in the new entity constitutes a conflict of interest. . , and that the assets were bought at an undervalued price, about 50 million dollars.

“Any way you look at it, this is really poor management of our assets,” said Arthur Falls, one of the former employees who serves as a spokesman for the group. The group argues that the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the new entity, ConsenSys Software Inc., since the transfer implies much greater value for the assets.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for ConsenSys AG, which now operates as ConsenSys Mesh, denied the allegations, saying the transfer was made in consultation with leading law firms and based on an independent valuation by PwC. The statement claims that the price was reasonable at the time the transfer was made in 2020, during a time of pandemic-induced economic uncertainty, before the latest cryptocurrency bullishness and NFT craze boosted the value of the active to new highs.

Given the obstacles in the way of reversing a complex transaction from years ago, it is unclear what the outcome of a successful legal challenge might be. But the conflict highlights the industry’s difficult transition from its roots in shoddy, informal projects fostered by idealistic computer programmers to becoming a huge global corporation. Falls said one privacy policy update launched last month that allows MetaMask to collect users’ IP addresses was symbolic of MetaMask’s distaste for the ideals of cryptocurrency under its new ownership.

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One of the pioneers of the gaming world. He’s had enough of meta.

Friday evening Inside information reported that John Carmack, the designer of 1990s paradigm-shifting video games like Doom and Quake, would be leaving Meta, where he had been CTO since 2013 and advised the CTO of Oculus.

Carmack’s justification: that the company is run inefficiently, with the very thing that his expensive and ambitious investment in the metaverse allows, namely the size of the company, the project gets bogged down in red tape.

“We have a ridiculous number of people and resources, but we constantly sabotage ourselves and waste effort,” Carmack wrote in the post announcing his resignation, which he later published. fully placed On Facebook. “There is no way to cover this up; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”

Long one of the most outspoken game developers of his generation, Carmack bemoaned the same issues. Lex Fridman Podcast at the beginning of this year. Yet age seems to have softened Carmack, who nonetheless insisted in his suicide note that “virtual reality can add value to the most people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do so than Meta,” and on Twitter, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. I wished him the best saying “it’s impossible to overstate the impact you’ve had on our work and the industry in general… Thank you and see you in VR.” — dirk robertson

Point, counterpoint: Not everyone is convinced of big language models like the one ChatGPT runs on. going to “finish the task”.

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, disagreed. an essay published last week by the think tank, arguing that the human judgment involved in communication makes it impossible to automate except for routine or functional tasks.

“…Knowledge is needed to convey knowledge, or even have the discernment to judge whether an AI-generated text makes sense or responds appropriately to an ad,” writes Pondiscio. Furthermore, he argues that the assumption that AI could replace human writing is itself dangerous for literacy: “Artificial intelligence will provide time-saving tools for those with knowledge, but will be fatal to the interests of those without.” Knowledge, denied the opportunity to develop language skills, highly educated people take for granted, and that’s what makes AI tools useful.

In other words, as fellow expert Samuel Hammond wrote his own recent post On the social implications of AI, it’s not about what the technology can do, but about what we choose to do and what we choose not to do with it. — dirk robertson