above: Christoph Jentzsch

Christoph Jentzsch cannot stop collaborating.

Most famous for writing the code for the DAO while he was at slock.it in 2016, Jentzsch is embarking on a similar, albeit less risky, endeavor with corpus.ventures, a development studio seeking to bring three to five web3 startups to life in a given year.

As a venture studio, corpus will seek projects that it can turn into revenue-generating businesses, all focused on creating the needed infrastructure in the Ethereum web3 space. If you’ve known Jentzsch for years as I have, you’ll note the echo in corpus.ventures with the DAO, which brought together startups in search of money to develop their ideas into businesses. Jentzsch unknowingly wrote a bug into the DAO code (at line 666 no less), $55 million dollars was lost – then regained – a new blockchain called Ethereum classic was born, and it almost destroyed the nascent Ethereum community in the meantime. (There’s a book I recommend on this).

Corpus is no DAO. There’s no outside money involved and Jentzsch told me they plan to move quickly to dump a project if it doesn’t seem promising after about six months. Jentzsch is the father of eight and it seems the collaborative itch is a part of his makeup. After selling slock.it in 2019 he stayed on as CEO for two years, then left to take six months off.

After that half year, he said, “you know me, I’m an entrepreneur, so I had the urge to do something.” His first idea was to make it simpler to digitize the ownership structure of companies with tokens. Speaking to his former slock.it colleagues, he realized they had ideas of their own as to what was needed for web3 infrastructure. 

“So we said ‘what do we want to do, what’s the next big thing we want to build?’” he said.

A blog post introducing corpus.ventures

Prior to co-founding slock.it, Jentzsch was a software engineer on Ethereum who tested the different versions of the blockchain to make sure they all communicated with each other correctly. The versions are called clients and are written in different software languages like Go and Java, and it was Jentzsch’s job to try to break them as a way to make the entire system stronger.

But there’s a deeper drive pushing Jentzsch these days. When he looks around the web3 space he isn’t overly impressed with what he sees.

“I’m disappointed that we are by far not reaching where we thought we would in 2022,” he said. “If you’d speak to any of us from 2015 or 2016 or even 2017 what we think would have been built and how the world would be functioning, we’re still very far away.” He pointed to the lack of a decentralized version of Twitter or Discord as examples. “We are still very far away from mainstream adoption of actual web3,” he said.

To help remedy that, corpus.ventures has four early projects in mind. The first is the cap table already mentioned. They also want to create a tool called Gas Hawk that will help users save on Ethereum transaction fees that will be a MetaMask integration. A project called dm3 will be a decentralized and encrypted mail service between people who have Ethereum Naming Service (ENS) addresses with public keys stored on the blockchain. Lastly, Common Ground is a Discord competitor with token gated channels that Jentzsch hopes will appeal to DAO communities.

“Discord is a mess,” he said.

Scams scams scams

As someone who has been instrumental in helping build so much in Ethereum, the ongoing prevalence of scams rankles Jentzsch. “If you go on YouTube and search for blockchain, Ethereum or Bitcoin what you get is 99 percent scams – pump and dump things, discussing token prices, doing any little updates of how the price is behaving – and this has absolutely nothing to do with how Bitcoin started or how Ethereum started,” he said. “Since this whole system is completely permissionless there’s no one protecting the brand of Ethereum or the crypto space or blockchain in general.” While there are still good people and projects in the space, they only account for about 5 to 10 percent, he said.

The current crypto bear market will shake out the bad actors as has happened in the past. Jentzsch has been through all the cycles before and sees the current market as “a healthy correction,” he said. “It’s a great environment to start a company, to build.”  

For someone with web3 and collaboration in his blood like Jentzsch, and given how much still needs to be built in Ethereum and web3, the blockchain world should be glad for having him still in the game.