“V God’s Mom’s Best Friend”: Analyzing the Team Behind Metis

A few days ago, while scrolling through Weibo, I saw several industry influencers posting this image.

Weibo blockchain influencer mocking

"The project background and team are quite good, and the founder is a close friend of Vitalik's mother," this point caught my attention. I opened the comments section, and it was filled with mockery like "This made me laugh," "This is Vitalik's aunt," and "All sorts of strange things are coming out," confirming the ridicule.

Originally, I was just an onlooker, but I happened to notice that this project combines Layer 2 and DAO, two areas I am particularly interested in, and has also reached a deep cooperation with the star project Casper. I was curious about what kind of project this was, so I did some research.

The project that sparked the discussion is called Metis, an open framework built on a Layer 2 protocol for the creation, management, and development of DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Companies). It focuses on building sustainable, decentralized companies on high-performance underlying blockchains through the DAC framework.

According to the official website, Metis's co-founder and CEO, Elena Sinelnikova, has been dedicated to education and advocacy in the blockchain industry. She is a co-founder of the educational non-profit organization CryptoChicks, which is currently the largest female blockchain community in the world, with members in 56 countries.

Another co-founder of CryptoChicks is Natalia Ameline, the mother of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. By the way, Vitalik's father, Dmitry Buterin, also co-founded the blockchain education company Blockgeeks, developing courses in blockchain technology. This family is committed to promoting cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

(Right: Natalia Ameline, Middle: Elena Sinelnikova)

According to Coindesk, CryptoChicks is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing more women and youth into the blockchain industry, conducting technical training and hackathon events globally, including in Canada and Pakistan, and supplying numerous developers to the industry.

During her work leading the community building for CryptoChicks, Elena identified a need for distributed collaboration and organizational development. Therefore, she has been looking for mechanisms to facilitate effective collaboration in a decentralized environment lacking trust. However, achieving decentralized collaboration and management is still relatively challenging. Based on this gap, Elena founded the Metis project.

It seems that the founder of Metis can indeed be called a friend and business partner of Vitalik's mother. However, Metis did not leverage this fact for publicity in their official promotions, and Natalia was not mentioned in their promotional materials.

The image that was "mocked" on Weibo was highlighted by a domestic investment institution when introducing the project, which unexpectedly became a point of ridicule.

The negative comments surrounding this incident may stem from the past experiences in the blockchain industry where many project teams used endorsements or even engaged in false advertising to harvest investors, leaving a bad aftertaste. Initially, I also had doubts and approached the situation with a curious mindset, but I found that this is indeed a fact.

I believe that in the current industry environment, the founder's background or endorsements from big names are important, but they are not the decisive factors for a project's rise.

Many high-quality project developers were once unknown or even chose to remain anonymous, yet they achieved great success, driving industry development and providing good returns for investors. We should focus more on the project's sector, technological strength, product innovation, and other fundamentals.

Metis's choice to build a decentralized organization protocol based on Layer 2 is, in my opinion, a market-promising sector.

The emergence of smart contracts has provided a great direction for exploring decentralization. Relying on smart contracts, DeFi has surged, restructuring finance in a decentralized manner, leading to the bull market from 2020 to the present. DAO takes it a step further, making direct democracy possible and achieving true decentralization in organizational governance for the first time.

However, due to the inadequacies of blockchain infrastructure, many complex business logics, and the limitations of existing DAO organizations in terms of public chain processing speed and the complexity of smart contracts, various Layer 2 solutions (such as Lightning Network, Rollups, etc.) have been discussed in the industry for many years.

(Vitalik's Twitter screenshot)

The Metis team has announced the technical roadmap for the Layer 2 DAO foundational protocol based on Optimistic Rollup, planning to officially launch the Layer 2 DAO foundational protocol in Q2 2021, which will support projects in generating genesis DACs (Decentralized Companies). This will generally apply to existing decentralized applications and support the rapid migration of traditional Web2 applications to Web3. Perhaps this could lead to a wave of traditional communities and organizations joining the blockchain world.

Currently, Metis has received investments from institutions including OKEx's Block Dream Fund, Waterdrip Capital, CatcherVC, DFG, Hotbit, Jubi Labs, and others. Meanwhile, the public chain project CasperLabs announced a partnership with Metis and initiated a joint laboratory: TranspilerLab.DAC.

It seems that Metis is indeed a legitimate project and not just here to issue tokens and make money.

I also hope to tell all the "onlookers" that digging into information and forming your own investment logic is extremely important. The fact that the project founder is a relative of someone is not important at all; it might be better to let the dust settle for a while and see how its development trend unfolds.