In 2011, Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Drug Enforcement Administration head Michele Leonhart, imploring them to take down the dark web marketplace, Silk Road. Named after the Eurasian trade network, the website was notorious for hosting seedy – often illicit – trade activity.

"The only method of payment for these illegal purchases is an untraceable peer-to-peer currency known as Bitcoins,” the letter stated. "We urge you to take immediate action and shut down the Silk Road network."

From Ireland, Ciaran Murray watched Schumer give a fiery Senate speech on the topic. “I was like, okay, [Bitcoin] isn't just theory anymore, it's practice, and it's working,” he said recently, speaking in a white room, a blue jeweled chandelier dangling above him. “If people are using it for nefarious stuff, they can use it for other stuff in the future.”

Murray’s an economist and political scientist. The year before, in 2010, while working with the European Commission, someone sent him the Bitcoin whitepaper. “It blew my mind,” he said. “I was into computers all my life, and I was like, wow, that's incredible.”

Spurred by Schumer’s speech, Murray dove headlong into crypto. He invested in Bitcoin, and set up a successful over-the-counter (OTC) business performing Bitcoin arbitrage. In 2015, he founded Verbatm, a blockchain consultancy business. Later, in 2021, he incorporated Global Access Labs, a development company that built Sumero, a decentralized finance (DeFi) application and synthetic assets protocol (after two years, due to crypto’s complex regulatory landscape, Murray sunset the project). 

Murray, a self-described “news junkie,” shifted the Sumero team’s focus to his latest initiative, Olas, a decentralized publishing protocol whose goal is to become the “most trusted media platform on the Internet.”  

Prior to working with the European Commission, Murray spent a couple years at the British media conglomerate, Sky Media. “I had my eyes opened to how advertising dominated content,” he said. “The main goal is to attract attention to maximize advertising revenues. Truth and accuracy are often sacrificed in pursuit of this goal.”

Since Murray’s days at Sky, the state of journalism has only grown grimmer, particularly outside major national publications. Local newspapers are hemorrhaging resources – many have shuttered entirely. And digital-first publications struggle to compete with major platforms’ ad-supported business models.

Insidiously, these platforms have become our de facto curators, feeding us content in convenient, digestible morsels – without much space for journalists, or loyalty to “truth and accuracy.”

By using the blockchain to verify information sources, though, Murray imagined a way to circumvent the ad model, empower journalists and “democratize access to non-private information.”

“I started seeing all this stuff coming together in web3 with proof of human protocols, but we needed all sorts of other things in place to actually build the thing I thought we could do,” he said. “That started falling into place last year, and that's when we started pressing go on it.” 

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Olas is "a completely modular system where you can build your own newspaper without any paywalls," says Murray, the project’s chief executive officer. Readers will have the flexibility to follow specific journalists, curate their own news feeds, or rely on curators who act as "modern day editors" to compile news from the open source platform. “Or,” he added, “you might even have bots that will be coded to deliver newspapers every day.”

Notably, Olas is completely open-source, meaning anyone can contribute as a journalist. To ensure “truth and accuracy,” Olas will leverage market and reputation-based protocols, which rely on robust incentives for fact-checking and quality control.

The process begins with journalists staking money on their articles. (There will be fundraising mechanisms for “up-and-coming” journalists, Murray says, to ensure writers aren’t “reaching into their own rent money.”) A portion of that stake goes to fact-checkers as a bounty. “Imagine if every single reader who reads your article has a chance to make a profit from correcting you,” Murray said.

If errors are found, a judging panel – comprised of subject matter experts and general community representatives that “guard against collusion and groupthink” – will vote privately on the truth. “The only winning strategy is to report things as truthfully as possible,” Murray said. “And then payouts for everyone involved is dictated by the market outcome.” (Olas, a non-profit, will earn money via protocol transaction fees.)

For journalists, that level of scrutiny may sound intimidating. But, Murray asserts, despite removing paywalls – and potentially ads – Olas will be lucrative for its writers. How? Quadratic funding and micropayments. 

"We're positioning for a future where micropayments are going to be ubiquitous,” he said. “Where you will scroll to the bottom of an article and you will just be able to [tip] 20 cents, 50 cents, a dollar, whatever." In the long run, Murray believes, "tipping is going to dwarf what journalists earn in salaries now.”

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Aside from a recent grant from the Nethermind Starknet program, Olas has been completely funded by Murray. “As I said, I got into crypto very early – I'm very fortunate,” he said. “I have complete control over the direction of the project currently. Not many founders have that luxury.” 

The grant money is earmarked to build a decentralized prediction market called ‘Opinion Markets.’ Decentralized prediction markets like Polymarket allow anyone to wager crypto on the outcomes of future events. This year they’ve grown increasingly popular.

Ahead of the US presidential election, Polymarket’s volume has skyrocketed. And back in July, the marketplace secured a partnership with the publishing platform, Substack, enabling writers to embed Polymarket wagers in their posts.

Polymarket deals in binary outcomes, though, and as a completely open platform covering myriad topics with extensive nuance, Olas has to account for much more breadth.

To do so, Opinion Markets will employ an academic formula called “Bayesian Truth Serum,” which will enable people “not just to say, ‘this opinion is good,’” Murray said, “but also to make a prediction about what most people will think about this.

“It's been tried and tested in numerous academic settings – with money as well,” he continued. “It's extremely exciting stuff.”

But Olas is as ambitious as it is exciting. A lot needs to go right. Micropayments are still an emerging user behavior in many parts of the world. And Olas will need to corral “thousands of journalists to be ready on day one to actually supply a product,” Murray said. 

Tokenized incentives, he hopes, will help. “It’s a bit like when Uber launched,” he said, describing a native Olas token that early adopting journalists will earn. “If drivers didn't just get paid in dollars, but actually got paid in Uber stock, they would be very rich today,” he said.

The road ahead is long, though, to a place where we can talk about Olas and Uber in the same breath. “There are huge technical barriers to overcome because this stuff is really complex,” Murray said, predicting the platform’s arrival is at least a year away. “We are doing something nobody's gotten near doing before.”

Others have tried, though. Not only will Olas need to compete against traditional news outlets and emerging web3 competitors, they’ll have to convince people they can succeed where others have failed. 

The most notable bust was Civil, a decentralized media platform that attempted to use similar token mechanics to generate a trustworthy media platform. In 2020, failing to gain sufficient traction, the buzzy startup folded.

“We developed compelling technology,” Civil’s Chief Executive Officer Matthew Iles told Poynter, “but in the end, tried to do something that was not ready for prime time.”

Murray is betting that the ecosystem’s maturation means “prime time” is nearly here. And, slowly but surely, things do change. Last month, Chuck Schumer – now the Senate Majority Leader – showed up to court crypto voters on a “Crypto4Harris” zoom call. He expressed optimism that, despite divided times, the Senate can realistically pass a bipartisan crypto regulation bill before the end of the year. “Passing legislation this year is absolutely possible,” he said, “even in these divided times.”

Care to make a wager on that?