Catching up with Olaf Carlson-Wee

We had a chance to talk to Olaf Carlson-Wee on what he has been up to and how he feels about the Tezos Ecosystem

Catching up with Olaf Carlson-Wee of Polychain Capital

Olaf Carlson-Wee, former board member of Tezos Foundation and founder of Polychain Capital was kind enough to share a few of his thoughts on Tezos and what particular trends/innovations in the blockchain space excite him the most for 2020 and beyond.

Polychain was one of the first major crypto funds to come around in late 2016. A lot has changed since then. What innovations in the blockchain space excite Polychain the most for 2020 and beyond?

One area that I’m very excited about is the automation of the corporate structure through smart contracts. So, this for example, looks like systems like MakerDAO and StakerDAO where you have a thing that looks a little bit like a company but the product is a smart contract. Instead of shares of the company, there’s a token that accrues revenue from the successful operations of those underlying smart contracts. So, that’s one area. Another area that we’ve been excited about for many years is the proliferation of Proof-of-Stake as a consensus mechanism and additionally — novel incentive mechanisms to drive behavior with cryptocurrencies. If you look at for example, bitcoin mining, and you think of the function you’re trying to optimize for as being hashrate — bitcoin mining as an incentive mechansim has been quite successful at generating substantial hashrate. One thing we think about is what other types of human coordination problems could be addressesed using a similar cryptoeconomic incentive mechansim. So, we’re looking at if you could bootstrap other types of human behaviors or other types of network effects other than say — hashrate in bitcoin mining. We very much expect the answer is yes.

Polychain is one of the largest Tezos bakers. Apart from this, you have spoken about Tezos on several occasions, Olaf. Compared to other PoS protocols, how do you feel Tezos differentiates?