When we invested in Onename in 2014 it was with the conviction that decentralized applications will require human readable identity systems for some applications. Take the DAO for example. As of writing this post it has raised nearly $110 million dollars including some from me. The allocation of this capital will be decided through voting. Now imagine the difference between voting on a proposal made by 0x8f585e5578a9695151fe51ac92f560c8a9cc9a14 (my DAO address) versus one made by albertwenger (a human readable name registered using Onename). It will be interesting to see to what extent the DAO can succeed using only or primarily machine readable addresses.

In order to build a decentralized infrastructure for naming the Onename team wound up building a fair bit of technology which has become known as the Blockstack. It allows the creation of namespaces on top of the bitcoin blockchain and supports naming, identity, storage and authentication services. A great community has sprung up around Blockstack with many active contributors. There are many applications for using Blockstack and Onename turns out to be only one of them as the following picture illustrates.

To avoid confusion, the team has decided to change the name of the company to Blockstack Labs. Blockstack Labs will continue to drive forward the development of the Blockstack platform.