What happens when you’re TOO EARLY?

This is a story about two friends who met at Facebook, got their dreams crushed, and kept the dream alive.

So You Wanna Make A Stablecoin?

The year is 2021, and David Marcus (fmr. PayPal) has just been put in charge of a project called “Facebook Coin”. The team quickly grows to 50 people, which includes Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching.

Mo Shaikh was raised on welfare with his family in Brooklyn. After getting his MBA, he goes through The Wall Street Obstacle Course, from KPMG to RBC to Blackrock to ClearBridge to Abraaj to Boston Consulting Group to Consenys to Meridio (a real estate play) and then to Meta in 2021.

Avery Ching was raised in a completely different climate; Hawaii. Before Meta, he went through the Computer Science Obstacle Course, going from being an Intern at The Los Alamos Laboratory to getting his Phd at NorthWestern while Principle Engineering at Yahoo to landing at Meta in 2011 in Menlo Park, the same place Edison invented the lightbulb.

The Fulcrum

Anyhoo, the formal announcement of Facebook Coin is called Libra, and all hell ensues. Up until this point, Bitcoin was still hovering around the $45k mark, far from today’s highs of $110k+. Blockchain was still a joke then. But now that a FAANG was interested? Uh oh.

In comes The Fulcrum, also known as the political, legal, regulatory and compliance eye of sauron. Senate Hearings ensue. Elizabeth Warren grills everyone.

In truth, Facebook was too early. But they did achieve something nobody else could: they got the conversation started amongst the FAANGs. This wasn’t just some Michael Saylor Bitcoin Rube Goldberg Machine anymore. If blockchain couldn’t scale…then why was Meta interested?

Libra eventually gets squashed, but the vision lived on.

Staying Alive, Staying Alive

Like Jobs and Woz, Shaikh and Cheng launched Aptos, a layer-one blockchain leveraging the same innovations created at Meta, a consensus mechanism called DiemBFT and the programming language Move for smart contracts, designed to mimic the safety and performance of Rust.

Today, after receiving $300M+ from the likes of a16z, Multicoin and friends, Aptos is not only a force in the real-world asset space but also the astronomically-profitable stablecoin space.

The Twist: The Libra Legacy

Now here’s the interesting part I didn’t expect to learn while writing this: Aptos isn’t the only popular crypto project to be created by ex-Meta talent.

The surging Sui network? That was created by Evan Cheng, who was also a part of Meta Diem project and is also leveraging the same smart contract programming language that Aptos is: Move. In fact, many people look at Sui and Aptos as different ways to unlock the value of the Move-oriented approach the speedy scalable and secure smart contract design.

And it doesn’t just end there. The popular OP_CAT Proposal on Bitcoin? That’s Xiohui Lui, fmr. Meta.

Everyone’s heard of ServiceNow. What most people don’t know is that it was created by former the former dominant player in the ITSM space, Peregrine.

Here’s the truth: success leaves clues, and visions don’t die when people say no.

In fact, the people who handle rejection the best often prosper.

Today, after Shaikh's recent departure for personal health reasons, Solmon Tesfaye leads the charge with Avery Ching. Avery's job is to do what he did at Meta. At Meta, Avery’s job was to be the overall tech lead of all of Meta’s batch processing teams, including Spark, graph processing (Apache Giraph), Facebook Hive/Hadoop (Corona), distributed scheduling, and the unified programming model for pipelines.

These technologies power analytics for all of Meta’s products and scale to hundreds of thousands of machines. Solomon's background is Investment Banking, which is key to unlocking the partnerships in Web2 to really turn on daily transaction volume, total value locked, new stablecoin issuance and daily new wallet generation.