adappt.io is now adaptive-emergent (part 1 of 3): history

This series of blog posts starts off a new direction for an organisation that went from a going concern to a passion project, and the realisation that the name outlived its purpose.  

adappt's stylised "A"

The Timeline

adappt was formed in 2015, just after the launch of the cryptocurrency Ethereum (30-July-2015). 

2015: 

Three of us began investigating a business model for the custody of crypto funds using multisig. Years later, crypto has entered the mainstream. Coin owners are getting older, so there is still a case for safe custody of the keys and ensuring the investment lives on as part of an estate, but in 2015 it was all pretty Wild West. The people attracted to crypto were not necessarily above board. Ultimately two of us categorised this as unnecessary risk and bailed.

2017: 

The inaugural APAC Blockchain conference was held in March 2017 in Sydney, and future industry heavyweights were there, including Joe Lubin from ConsenSys and an army of IBMers. Even then, forces were seeking to standardise (much too early in my opinion), and fintech showed up, initially as the ADCCA (Australian Digital Currency Commerce Association), later Blockchain Australia, and now renamed again as DECA (Digital Economy Council of Australia). No room for anarchists here.

Meetups via meetup.com hit their stride: physical get-togethers were arranged by the platform. Mike was a co-host of the first Blockchain Developer’s Meetup at the MBTC ("Melbourne Bitcoin Technology Centre"), later rebranded as the Blockchain Centre. Each week brought new, heady ideas, such as Flux, a direct democracy political party using a blockchain to instill the will of the people in the Senate. Unfortunately, we discovered with Brexit the will of the people was problematic, since most people were idiots.

2017 was also the year when Bitcoin prices went nuts.

The original Melbourne Bitcoin Technology Centre

2018:

The following year Mike served on the APAC Blockchain advisory board, suggesting and arranging speakers for the conference, but even then the tech was losing its revolutionary sheen, with Proof of Work getting more and more expensive and Ethereum's alternative proof of stake appearing to be gameable.

In June, Mike met Philip Beadle and David Meister, core developers in a slightly misleadingly named project called Holochain. Yes it has chains (plural) but it was really a generalised Bittorrent, a peer-to-peer distributed network framework.  This made more sense than consensus, where with blockchains "the losers agree" as Philip put it. Holochain named its components after elements found in biology, such as "DNA", "cells", and "zomes" (short for chromosomes). It was this aspect that drove the adappt trajectory, along with this seminal video from Holochain spokesperson Matthew Schutte.

September and Mike started the role of Holochain Melbourne community manager. The technology was still immature and just being rebuilt using the Rust programming language from its original incarnation in Go. Meetups attracted up to 200 people in the stately ballroom of the YBF building on the corner of Bourke and Williams.

The grand old ballroom at YBF

Philip and world-first Holoport demo

2018 also saw RedGrid (now called RedgridGPT.com) ramping up, the commercial venture to use Holochain to balance the electricity grid. 

2019-2021:

RedGrid explored and developed some intriguing new approaches to the energy grid problem, including installing smart plugs in a sample new suburb from Australian property developer Mirvac, together with an onboarding app to monitor and suggest when to use large appliances for cost savings and energy efficiency.

Mike and sim were keeping Holochain's biomimetic properties in mind when they had a left-field lunch with molecular biologists from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation and when presenting to Australia's telco incumbent Telstra and its IoT arm. The same presentation was given to China Light and Power in Hong Kong, and it was striking how one of the most urbanised areas on Earth "got it"; they got the natural approach to load balancing. We had the same reaction from Telstra and others.

2019 brought a historic gathering to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, the "Holochain Intensive". Key minds from the community came together, and afterwards co-founder Art Brock came to Melbourne for a Meetup and to provide a course in cryptoeconomics for the Redgrid team.

It was this course that led to the design and launch of the energy-based ERC20 cryptocoin $IOEN, or "the Internet of Energy Network". It was a rollercoaster of an experience, including the launch at 1am Melbourne time!

May 2020 would have seen Melbourne hosting an international Holochain hackathon, but of course the world changed in March. The physical meetups never resumed.

2021:

The second year of the pandemic brought a reorg of RedGrid, from a peak mid-year with something like 20 employees and contractors. Adappt.io went dormant, but the biology metaphor never really went away.

Check out part 2 as we say adieu to the adappt brand and usher in the new!