Honorable P. Kevin Castel

United States District Court

for the Southern District of New York

11/13/2021

Dear Judge Castel,

I’m Ameen Soleimani. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, the son of a dentist and electrical engineer. I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. in chemical engineering in 2012, then decided to learn software engineering. My path led me first to crypto and then Ethereum, and I joined ConsenSys in 2016 to write smart contracts. I left in 2017 to start SpankChain because I felt that crypto could be useful for adult models who are routinely ostracized by banks and financial services companies. In 2018 I summoned MolochDAO, a punk-rock blockchain-based non-profit that raised $5M+ from Vitalik Buterin, Joe Lubin, and others to give grants for open-source Ethereum development on public goods. More recently, I cofounded Reflexer Labs, which is building a robust ETH-backed stablecoin called RAI that can maintain stability without being pegged to $1 USD.

Virgil and I met in 2018 at Ethereum conferences. I was giving presentations on my team’s cutting edge research on scalable tipping for our crypto camsite, and Virgil was impressed. He looked beyond the ostensibly inappropriate use-case and found legitimate tech R&D for Ethereum. Intrigued, he approached me, we became fast friends, and I hired him as an advisor to be a liaison with the Ethereum community. He made many helpful introductions and provided me with guidance with how best to engage the Ethereum community and leadership, almost always advising me to be more graceful and less rambunctious.

Virgil’s best quality, perhaps his defining virtue, is his inclination to seek out positive sum games, even with adversaries. Most people hate their perceived enemies and strategically demonize them. Virgil isn’t like that. His favorite way of removing an adversary is to turn them into a friend, usually by finding some avenue for mutual collaboration. He is, in a word, a diplomat.

In 2017, the aftermath of The DAO hack caused a permanent split in the Ethereum community, with ~10% of people choosing to part ways with the Ethereum community that chose to hard fork to reverse the $150M hack despite the “code is law” slogan. The disgruntled minority formed their own separate blockchain called Ethereum Classic (ETC). The ETC community was openly hostile to the ETH community, accusing the ETH community leaders of breaking the social contract around immutability. While most people in ETH felt anger and engaged in social media feuds (yours truly included), Virgil sought them out, befriended them, and offered them a developer grant from the Ethereum Foundation to work on shared infrastructure that benefitted both ETC and ETH. This had the fortunate effect of diffusing the resentment felt by ETC community, which no amount of my arguing on the internet would have been able to accomplish.

As a bridge builder, Virgil has a remarkable ability to meet people where they are. For example, he was responsible for Ethereum becoming considered Halal by Islamic Scholars. He researched the requirements for approved Islamic finance and discovered that one of the requirements for “money” within a Sharia-compliant economy was “intrinsic value”. Learning this, he published an article called “Ether is more Halal than Bitcoin”, which was picked up by an Islamic fund manager and led to them meeting at a conference in Seoul. They worked together for over a year to engage Islamic finance compliance experts and ultimately received certification of Ethereum’s Shariah compliance. Now, one might wonder, what is a nerdy white guy from Alabama doing pitching the moslems on a world computer? But that would be a silly question, because that was Virgil at his best. His love for Ethereum was so powerful, he felt it would be a tragedy if the billions of people living under Islamic regimes were restricted from using it, and so he made the effort to navigate their religious bearuacracy in order to grant them access without fear of committing haram.

To understand what possessed Virgil to go to such great lengths to proliferate Ethereum across borders and ideological divides, you must first understand why he loved Ethereum so much, and what Ethereum meant to Virgil. In his 2019 article “Ethereum is a game-changing technology, literally”, he writes that his answer to the recurring question “what is Ethereum for?" is that “Ethereum is an unprecedented arena for playing cooperative games”.

*Non-cooperative game theory, the original and most widely used branch of game theory, assumes the absence of an external authority to enforce rules. Fundamentally, I claim that the Ethereum ledger constitutes an incorruptible, omnipresent, external overseer that no matter the game is always ****available to enforce agreements among players. This implies that Ethereum, in theory, could turn any non-cooperative game into a cooperative game (sometimes called a coalitional game).

The transmogrification from non-cooperative to cooperative games is achieved by a technique we term Game Warping defined as using transparent, triggerable, unstoppable burns and on-chain side-payments to move game-theoretic equilibria or to create new player actions. Game Warping stacks as a new layer atop an uncooperative game to make cooperation the Rational choice.*