Anonymity and pseudonymity are absolutely paramount in how we think about Ethos. While we are working to bring reputation and credibility onchain, one of the fundamental values of crypto is the ability to remain anonymous while operating.

With Ethos, we believe we can enable crypto participants to build up their reputations while remaining completely anonymous… but we’re here to break the mold a bit today and doxx ourselves.

Why? We have credibility, want to share our motivations, and want to give you a basis to trust us more. Having trust purely behind an onchain identity is still challenging. While Ethos will one day solve that problem, it doesn’t solve it perfectly today.

So, who are the Ethos founders?

Trevor Thompson (CEO, pseudo “Serpin Taxt / 0x5f Capital”) & Ben Walther (CTO, pseudo “smirks”) both started Ethos together in late 2023 as an idea that stemmed from what Trevor saw as an opportunity with Friend.tech

We previously worked together at Atlassian in co-founder roles in the company’s incubator program for new products. From an idea - to a pitch - to a 30-person team to paying customers… we built the team and the product together, from first lines of code to paying customers.

Trevor

Trevor’s background lies primarily in product, with over 12 years of experience doing various product roles from building forecasting models in R for finance teams to being the first engineering hire at a Y-combinator startup that was trying to build an agnostic chat product across Slack, Teams and Hipchat.

He joined Atlassian in 2017 as a product guy working on Hipchat’s ecosystem and developer relations. After shutting Hipchat down, he helped grow Atlassian’s integration footprint from ~30k users to over 3m, bringing in ~150k attributed new Jira licenses through various growth hacking via integrations. He then met Ben and joined the new products team to help bring Beacon from idea to reality.

His crypto background goes back to 2011 when he was just a degen reading 4chan during summer break. After watching Bitcoin (buttcoin general if you’re old enough) hit $30 and crash miserably, he mostly wrote  crypto off as an investment asset (idiot) until the next big cycle in ~2017. Well, he did get scammed buying a Butterfly Labs miner once, too.

While trying to solve complex problems of modern SaaS, where walled gardens dominated and open protocols were long dead, Ethereum was a compelling vision… that Trevor read about but faded. It wasn’t until 2020, when everyone was stuck at home, that he realized he had time to think about side hustles and how to make some extra money.

In 2020, while trying to get an RTX 2080, he came across "cook groups" - where people sat in discords and spammed “restock” when the item had actually come back in stock on retail websites (anyone remember doing this for Neopets in like 2001 on AIM? okay just me?). He saw that Pokemon was coming back into focus and saw this group called “PokeMRKT” that was not only selling licenses OTC for $100 each, but was charging $30 a month per user to get access to pokemon info, flipping info, “calls”, everything.

He decided he’d spin up his own group called PokeStonks (hey.. it was the time of wallstreetbets okay..) to help people invest in pokemon cards, set up monitors for restock alerts, and build a strong discord community around it. He set up a relationship with distributors to get a “backdoor” and offer his group cheaper prices than Target or Walmart could offer as a perk. Pokestonks charged users $35/mo and got upwards of 250 members during peak Pokemon mania.. and while free today it is still an active community!

One thing that caught many people’s attention during the "reseller" era was NFTs. Pokestonks started exploring the idea of creating a second group called NiftyStonks, which would help people buy, sell, and flip NFTs. With a significant amount of success flipping NFTs, he and his co-founder Reeeshy decided to start 0x5f Capital in 2022 towards the end of the bull market, a liquid trading fund that specialized in “being in the trenches” and “having a pulse on the market.”

Trevor was doing all of this on the side of his cushy web2 job but was dying to take a shot at building something in Web3. It wasn’t until he had quit his job at Atlassian and joined another company as a Director of Product that he noticed a unique opportunity with what was getting built in Friend.tech and decided to reach out to Ben...

And Ben bought his friend.tech key and flipped it a few days later for 2x because he’s a boggleheaded investor.

Also, Trevor played runescape extensively from 2003 to 2005. Not sure why everyone asks him that!

Ben

As a security professional, Ben has been defending against fraud, scams, and hacks since 2006. His career blends academia, tradfi institutions, and silicon valley startups.

Part of Ben’s enthusiasm comes from his early career at FINRA detecting wash trading. FINRA is an almost 100 year institution formed by reputable traders trying to stand out among what was then a chaotic market. Sounds familiar!

Since then he’s helped catch collusion on Pokerstars, fight bots on MMOs, and detect insurance fraud. He’s always had a toe in academia, graduating from Cornell, authoring an O’Reilly book on web security, and teaching at Berkeley and Tufts.

In 2015 he was the 2nd hire at Stackrox, a security startup. Stackrox was funded by Sequoia in 2017 and later acquired by Red Hat for a mid 9-figure sum.

At the time he faded Eth due to the DAO hack, concluding that these immutable smart contracts would not be secure enough to survive adversarial conditions. Interested in privacy and thinking of cryptocurrency as a currency and not an asset, he bought Monero instead. Oops.

That itch to solve problems with new products continued after joining Atlassian. He pitched the idea for Beacon (another security product) to the internal accelerator. With Trevor, they grew the team, product, and vision.

Starting Ethos

With Ben and Trevor now chatting nightly, figuring out how to raise capital, geeking out over various mechanics they could one day imagine, and being slightly terrified of quitting their day job (while Trevor’s wife was pregnant!) to build this.. they were well on their journey to the early phases of Ethos.

Through 0x5f Capital and other intros and relationships that Trevor had built over the years, Trevor & Ben were able to find over 60 community member investors to invest in really just an idea and a whitepaper. Some of the community knew Trevor for trading, and others trusted him for managing their money. Most didn’t know Ben and had no idea if they could even build their crazy vision.

They knew they needed enough money to keep up with the market, hire some cracked developers, and pay for smart contract audits. In January, they quit their jobs, and in May, they closed their fundraise at $1.75m (which we actually took all the way up to $1.98 with a few follow-on investors like Primitive Ventures).

Since then, they’ve hired three full-time Atlassian employees, brought two products to market, and successfully delivered on the original vision.

Now what? It’s time to double down on what our earliest users love, assess that product-market fit, scale Ethos, and bring the vision of Ethos everywhere.

Stay tuned on that front.