Luke Stokes is the Managing Director at FIO, Hive Witness, FoxyCart.com and Co-Founder of eosDAC Custodian. An early adopter of crypto and blockchain technologies, Luke Stokes strongly believes that these emerging techs can be a mechanism for global non-violent consensus.
As the founder of The Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO), Luke manages this industry consortium, consisting of leading wallets, exchanges, crypto payment processors, and various other entities and community members dedicated to the pursuit of blockchain usability through the FIO Protocol.
Luke Stokes is passionate about voluntary systems of governance and has been involved in bitcoin since early 2013. He’s been a consensus witness for the Steem blockchain since early 2018 and a custodian for eosDAC, a community-owned EOSIO Block Producer and DAC Enabler, since its inception.
With a computer science degree from UPENN, he built, bootstrapped and co-founded the shopping cart software company FoxyCart over a ten year period and is now focused on blockchain technology as a means to create a world we all want to live in.
Luke currently lives in Puerto Rico with his wife and three children and enjoys discussing everything from philosophy, to consciousness, to voluntaryism, to love and awakening.
1. Can you tell us about your background and how did you end up in Puerto Rico?
2. You have been working on payment and wallet solutions for some time now. Can you tell us your trajectory on it?
3. Can you tell us about the Foundation for Interwallet Operability?
4. You spoke about DAOs, governance solutions, and rethinking human coordination that is focused around intrinsic motivation, flow, dharma and the like and NOT based on extrinsic motivations like rewards, punishments, and threats. How do you see this and specifically the challenges between centralised and decentralized systems?
5. According to crypto.com research in 2021, the number of global crypto owners almost tripled, from 106 million in January to 295 million in December. If we extrapolate a similar rate of increase in 2022, we are on track to reach 1 billion crypto users by the end of 2022. As someone very involved in crypto and the industry, how do you see this and what needs to be done to create a true internet of trust?
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Luke Stokes is the Managing Director for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability. He’s passionate about voluntary systems of governance and has been involved in bitcoin since early 2013. He’s been a consensus witness for the Steem blockchain since early 2018 and a custodian for eosDAC, a community-owned EOSIO Block Producer and DAC Enabler, since its inception.
With a computer science degree from UPENN, he built, bootstrapped and co-founded the shopping cart software company FoxyCart over a ten year period and is now focused on blockchain technology as a means to create a world we all want to live in. He currently lives in Puerto Rico with his wife and three children and enjoys discussing everything from philosophy, to consciousness, to voluntaryism, to love and awakening.
Luke founded the Foundation for Interwallet Operability with other personalities in the crypto and blockchain space to realize his vision of making them a mechanism for global non-violent consensus.
Luke explains the vision behind FIO as follows: “We are trying to make crypto easier. Crypto is complicated. It’s hard to use and frustrating. I have been in blockchain since 2013. It was January 2013 when I first got started. I’m a Science major guy, so I get tech but I also get how often it’s engineers building tools for other engineers. Those are super frustrating. FIO is a human-readable address. They exist as NFTs.
It’s a two-part NFT. Stokes is the domain part. Luke@Stokes would be the crypto handle that I use to send and, importantly, receive crypto. We have the ability to request funds from someone, including an encrypted memo. That’s a feature that people are used to in the traditional financial world, and they don’t have it in traditional crypto. It’s send-only. We have this usability layer sitting on top of your experience.”
Luke Stokes is also very interested in governance models and how the blockchain can revolutionize traditional methods. “I’m super interested in other governance models. For example, Eden on EOS is a fascinating exploration of an individual human being who goes through an induction process on a Zoom call much like this and they say, “I agree to the peace treaty.” Members of that community validate that they know that person in real life, “I trust that they will follow the peace treaty.” That gets minted as an NFT, put on-chain immediately, and that person becomes part of the community, and they do governance. They call it an election. You can check out More Equal Animals Dan Larimer’s book on this. You can download it for free and read it.
The idea is that those committed members of the community all have an equal vote, and they go into a political playoff process where they vote to say, “I would like this person to be able to use the committee treasury in this way, so it’s not so much a plutocracy.” I’m excited about those explorations. They often get Civil Attacked. A Civil Attack is a term where you have a whole bunch of accounts that look like 1,000 people, for example, but they are controlled by one person. They are all sock puppets. That’s another governance challenge that you run into often with these systems,” he said in a recent interview.
The Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO) intends to operate as a Decentralized Autonomous Consortia in the future, with many active members of the community contributing value to the project. The vision of FIO is to operate as a Decentralized Autonomous Consortia (DAC), guided by the community and blockchain ecosystem. FIO encourages everyone to participate in helping define the FIO Protocol and to provide feedback on how to improve blockchain usability. As a Foundation they value:
• Openness and Transparency
• Diversity in Community
• Fairness
The FIO Ecosystem consists of wallets, exchanges, crypto payment processors, various applications, and even the support of protocols. FIO Members are a specific group of FIO Ecosystem participants that have chosen to dedicate specific resources and commitments towards the FIO Protocol.
The FIO Protocol runs on its own dPoS blockchain – the FIO Chain. As the internal economic driver, the FIO Token is utilized to pay for all fees necessary to write data to the chain.
While the FIO Token is necessary to utilize the FIO Protocol – users do not need to directly obtain the token, as the FIO Protocol is designed for the ability to accept indirect payments. Users can potentially pay for their FIO Protocol usage through intermediaries, including through the Foundation itself, and through using various other popular cryptocurrencies.
FIO-enabled products may also choose to pay in part, or in whole, the cost of a FIO Crypto Handle registration/renewal. Please check with your provider for specifics on their implementation.
Managing Director: Luke Stokes
Partnership with Brock Pierce
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bestoked/
https://twitter.com/lukestokes
https://fioprotocol.io/about-fio/
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