With the help of Derek Robertson

A legal fight 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 As the court battle boils down to a dispute over corporate governance and the value of some key assets, it can also be seen as emblematic of a larger question shaping the world that crypto and Web3 evangelists hope to build: Should systems of blockchain adopt existing corporations and government? structures, or maximize your independence from them?

In the world of cryptocurrencies, a more pragmatic and business-minded field views the involvement of large banks and government entities as a validation of the technology and a prerequisite for reaching its potential. Crypto purists, on the other hand, are wary of such established players and see their arrival as a threat to the original promise of the blockchain, for example by collecting user data or ensuring compliance with government regulations that purists consider unfair. .

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

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

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

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

For the plaintiffs, victory is merely tactical. because lubin owns the majority of the shares of ConsenSys AG, the vote is expected to ratify the transfer. But the decision paves the way for more legal wrangling, because the vote would produce a shareholder resolution that can be challenged in court, allowing minority shareholders to insist on the essence of their legal challenge: that Lubin’s stake in the new entity represented a conflict of interest. interest, and that the assets were purchased at too low a price, approximately $50 million.

“Any way you look at it, this is very, very poor management of our assets,” said Arthur Falls, one of the former employees who acts 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 major law firms and based on an independent valuation by PwC. The statement contends that the price was reasonable at the time the transfer occurred in 2020, during a time of pandemic-induced economic uncertainty, before the latest cryptocurrency bull run and NFT craze boosted the value of assets to new highs.

Given the obstacles to reversing a complex transaction from years ago, it’s unclear what the outcome of a successful legal challenge might be. But the conflict highlights the industry’s difficult transition from its roots in rudimentary, informal projects fostered by idealistic computer coders to becoming one big global business. Falls said a privacy policy update issued last month allowing MetaMask to collect users’ IP addresses was emblematic of MetaMask’s departure from cryptocurrency ideals under its new ownership.

Read the full story here.

One of the pioneers of the world of video games. 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, was leaving Meta, where he served as CTO and consulting CTO for Oculus since 2013.

Carmack’s justification – that the company is being run inefficiently, with the very thing that his expensive and ambitious investment in the metaverse allows, namely the massive size of the company, is bogging the project 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. published in full on Facebook. “There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”

Carmack, long one of the most outspoken game developers of his generation, complained about the same problems in Lex Fridman Podcast at the beginning of this year. Age, however, seems to have softened Carmack, who nonetheless insisted in his parting note that “virtual reality can bring value to the most people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do so than Meta”, and on Twitter, Meta’s 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.” — derek robertson

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

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

“…Knowledge is needed to communicate knowledge, or even have the discernment to judge whether an AI-generated text makes sense or responds sufficiently to an ad,” writes Pondiscio. He further argues that the assumption that AI could replace human writing is actually dangerous for literacy in its own right: “Artificial intelligence will provide time-saving tools for those with knowledge, but will be fatal to the interests of those without.” they have knowledge. denied the opportunity to develop language proficiency, the well-educated take it for granted, and that they make AI tools useful.”

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