Joel Dietz, founder of Metamask and founding team member of Ethereum, is a romantic at heart. He creates art as “Cryptoapollo” that reflects the i
Joel Dietz, founder of Metamask and founding team member of Ethereum, is a romantic at heart. He creates art as “Cryptoapollo” that reflects the intersection between traditional art and technology.
“I have a very classical romantic temperament, which can be hard to bring into the modern world since romantically inclined people can be suppressed in the modern economy, but I also love the cutting edge of technology as it applies to art in architecture and sculpture,” explains Dietz.
“And like any technological enthusiast, I always try and explore the latest tech such as VR. Mostly my art is digital, although I have played around with physical pieces,” he declares.
He is a polymath and a Renaissance man whose passions include the arts, poetry and cryptography. He wears his heart on his sleeve, gets bored easily and is constantly learning.
Kindergarten programmer
When he first attended kindergarten as a child, Dietz immediately informed his mother that he wanted to be homeschooled instead. She agreed, and this decision was quickly vindicated.
Dietz started programming computers at age six, won a scholarship to Arcadia University at age 13 to study computer science, and thereafter collected prizes for his programming from Salesforce, Google and Topcoder.
After a brief academic career studying comparative poetry and mythology, Dietz joined the Ethereum team on day one, including creating the first educational channel for smart contracts (EtherCasts), writing the first Ethereum DEVGrant and starting Metamask at Devcon 0 — which was already his third cryptocurrency-related browser extension.
Dietz was also very interested in the evolution of governance and law with respect to cryptocurrencies. He did the first academic work on “crypto economics” at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, ran the first on-chain nonprofit election for the Bitcoin Foundation, created several governance-related protocols that culminated in Swarm Markets — the first regulated DeFi exchange in Germany — and co-organized the first conferences on law and cryptocurrency at Harvard and MIT. He is currently a Connection Science fellow at MIT and an industry adviser at Notre Dame.
His latest projects include a recently launched layer-two solution for the NFT industry called ArtWallet, which currently trades with a $600-million market cap. He is also working on a platform for building metaverses called the Meta Metaverse — which he started before Facebook rebranded to Meta.
I am looking for VCs that might understand the meta metaverse. Anyone come to mind?
— Joel Dietz (@jdietz) October 26, 2021
His academic research interests focus on the confluence of blockchain network topologies and swarm intelligence (self-organizing systems), especially how the principles underlying decentralized organizations can be used to fuel global innovation. He also works on holonic philosophy (how biological and social systems cohere), the evolution of jurisprudence (history of law), data-driven approaches to innovation, and smart city data architecture.
Model sculptor
Dietz dated a sculptor, Marianna Costi, which influenced his appreciation of physical art. He also became a model for her fresco painting, akin to Archangel Michael in Florence, which remains to this day on a wall in an unnamed church in Italy.
“I brought this appreciation of sculpture in 2014 to a Burning Man festival, where I designed and commissioned and created a giant metal sculpture, like a Spartan warrior mask, for my first large steel installation art,” he recalls.
His own life intersects with art too. A dalliance with erotic photography led him to host an erotic-themed opera with other like-minded people for his birthday. The operatic genre was chosen based on his admiration of Philip Glass’ Egyptian opera, “Akhnaten.”
“Philip Glass had, in turn, been inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and I am not alone in being interested to see how we can connect to ancient Egypt and its teachings,” he says.
Dietz has dabbled in poetry too, producing a book called Monkey Love in a tribute to a woman he was wooing at the time.
“It was, in the end, a failed romance, but the poetry reflects the free-spirited nature of my paramour. I think poetry is a way to delve into the details of feelings.”
Holistic view
And so, on to holon systems, which can be likened to the human body — where different, autonomous organs act together as a whole. Dietz uses it to describe elegant organizational design. His research culminated in an academic book, which is free to download from Academic.
“How we make decisions, even at the cellular level, is complex,” he says. “Philosophically, we may think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we also exist as part of larger social organizations, from family groups to towns to…
cointelegraph.com