Ex-PayPal exec David Sacks joins 0x in advisory capacity

David Sacks, former Paypal COO and Co-founder of venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, has joined 0x, an open protocol for decentralised exchange of Ethereum tokens.

In a tweet, he said: “Excited to join the advisory board of @0xProject – one of the most important projects in crypto – which is helping to build the security token tech stack along with @craft_ventures portfolio companies @harbor and @BitGo.”

Harbor CEO, Josh Stein, says: “0x and its growing network creates the opportunity to connect buyers and sellers around the world. By tackling the regulatory compliance challenges of tokenizing private securities, Harbor makes it easy for issuers and investors to abide by existing rules and regulations across jurisdictions.”

The internet of money

Sacks has been a vocal advocate for cryptocurrencies. Last year, he told CNBC: “It feels like we are witnessing the birth of a new kind of web. Some people have called it the decentralised web or the internet of money.”

The big development since the emergence of Bitcoin itself is that the underlying enabling technology, the blockchain, has been turned into a developer platform, he noted. “The leading platform is called Ethereum. It’s a platform for creating new kinds of decentralized apps and cryptocurrencies (or “tokens” or “coins”). It’s also created a new funding source for this innovation in the form of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). So we have all the ingredients necessary for a whole new wave of innovation,” he commented.

Sacks continued: “For those of us who lived through the dot-com era, this feels reminiscent. You have some of the same speculative excess and random enrichment. But you can also feel that something revolutionary is happening. Money is being made programmable. That’s a fundamental change with implications we can still barely see.”

Of course it’s real

When asked about an investor letter in which Oaktree’s Howard Marks said that Bitcoin and other digital assets weren’t real, Sacks shot back: “That’s like saying software isn’t real. Of course it’s real. Did the US dollar become less real when it stopped being backed by gold? Cryptocurrency is the next step in that same evolution — to make currency more virtual.”

In its purest form, currency is confidence, he observed. It’s a network effect around an agreed-upon medium of exchange that has some promise of scarcity. Bitcoin enforces its scarcity through a combination of cryptography and economic incentives (cryptoeconomics). “A lot of people find that more comforting than relying on the good faith of a government. In math we trust.”

Sacks concluded: “People in the US — and especially long time participants in the US financial system — have tended to underestimate Bitcoin because we have long enjoyed relatively stable political and financial systems. People in parts of the world with less trusted systems have gotten it sooner because almost anything would be preferable to having their life’s work trapped in a fiat currency that could collapse or be confiscated at any moment.”