In 2014, I was working with Erik on another crypto project, when he came to me and said that he had a new idea that he would like to explore simultaneously. He recounted a story where he had been trying to buy some altcoin (there weren’t many back then), and how cumbersome the process had been. He said since these crypto assets were natively digital, all the friction made no sense. He should be able to just “send one asset, and receive another one.” He wanted to scope out an initial solution to this idea, and he had a name for what we should call it — “ShapeShift.”

Follow ShapeShift’s first-ever customer transaction — BTC to LTC on 7/30/2014.

In that moment, the simple identification of a problem and a potential solution, what we now know as “ShapeShift,” was born. Most moments of genius seem obvious in hindsight, but at the time this radical concept of just “send on one blockchain and receive on another” was just that. It also helped establish an ethos among those involved with ShapeShift early on, that I believe still exists, and I want to make sure always exists at ShapeShift. I consider it core to our company DNA — this is the thought that we should “build where things are going to be, not where they are.’’ This is the innovative spirit at its core. Build for the future, certainly not for yesterday, but perhaps not always even for today.

When we built ShapeShift, every crypto company in the space was focused on building fiat on and off ramps for bitcoin, merchant processing (another form of a fiat on and off ramp), and some open source wallets. This is where the space was at the time, but we saw most of these efforts were ways to bridge the old world (fiat) and the new world (crypto), and as a result it came with all the friction of the old world.

ShapeShift, was one of the first to see that we should be building for the new world and not worry about the old, and as a result we could eliminate a ton of the friction. The old world was holding progress back, and that required us to take a risk and build something for a long-term market we were not sure yet would develop, but we were willing to take that risk.

Following this spirit, we made the decision early on (even though Erik was still somewhat of a “maximalist” at the time) that ShapeShift should remain asset agnostic. We didn’t know what the future held for us or the space. We wanted to give the market a chance to decide what should flourish, instead of trying to figure that out for ourselves. At the time, altcoins represented mostly “Copycats and scams,” to bitcoiners. In hindsight, if that maximalist perspective is shifted slightly, they should instead be viewed as the decentralized economic and technical innovation labs of the space. These alternative assets represented experiments, many of which failed. However, a number of them created significant opportunities in the space, or opened doors on the backs of their failed experiments for better, more successful ones.