From Texas Poker Genius to Witch Killer, How Did the Founder of LayerZero Become a Master of Human Nature?
Written by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
*This article was first published on May 16, 2024
LayerZeroWitchThe Great Purge is in full swing.
由于清洗机制之灵活（采用了「自曝」、「筛查」、「检举」等多重设计），清洗力度之大（预计只会保留 6.67% – 13.33% 的地址），清洗策略之精准（可根据已「自曝」地址的行为模式推导出更多女巫），在CommunityBryan Pellegrino, the founder of LayerZero, who is nicknamed "Stinky Penguin", has also been dubbed the "Master of Humanity".
What is less known is that Bryan had already demonstrated his amazing talent in human nature games long before he founded LayerZero - between 2009 and 2013, Bryan, who used the pseudonym PrimordialAA, was once considered one of the most noteworthy new stars in the field of professional Texas Hold'em.
In 2009, Bryan participated in the $10,000 Buy-In for the first time at the 40th World Series of Poker (WSOP). Xiaobai NavigationHe finished 8th in the heads-up tournament and earned $92,580. In 2012, Bryan finished 2nd in the $1,500 Buy-In event at the 43rd WSOP and earned $117,199.
Although he retired from the professional poker world early in search of "some interesting challenges", we can still find Bryan's brilliant record in professional poker player databases such as Poker Hendon Mob - the total profit from offline official competitions is US$569,647, the highest ranking in history is 1859, and the current ranking is 5097.
In 2013, Card Player, a poker media, conducted an exclusive interview with Bryan. In that interview, Bryan talked in detail about his best heads-up strategy and explained what decisions he would make under different opponent conditions, hand ranges, chip depths, and call pressure. Bryan can still cope with the ever-changing poker table with ease, so it is not difficult to understand why Bryan can complete precise strikes in the current situation of "the witch is in the light and I am in the dark".
The gaming genius in a small town
Bryan was born in a small town called Danbury in New Hampshire, USA. When he was born, the total population of Danbury was less than 1,000. When he was a child, Bryan felt that he was surrounded by only his relatives, so when he was 4 years old, he told his mother that he hoped to go to a place with more "different" interpersonal relationships in the future.
Bryan showed a certain talent for mathematics when he was about 6 years old. The Bryan family has four children, from youngest to oldest, namely Deanna, Manie, Bryan and Angela. Friday and Saturday nights are "game nights" for the Bryan family. The children will play games such as Monopoly and Western Army Chess together. Bryan enjoys it very much and almost always wins.
Bryan first encountered Texas Hold'em in high school. At the invitation of a friend, Bryan used his $20 pocket money to make his first bet. The gaming experience when he was a child gave him a keen sense of risk and strategy. That night, $20 became $60. Bryan used some of the money to buy himself a Georgetown University sweatshirt, and gave the rest of the money to his father to help Bryan open an online account.
Although he was addicted to playing cards in high school, Bryan still did well in his studies. When he graduated from high school, he ranked third in his class. For economic reasons, Bryan finally chose the University of New Hampshire in his home state, where he met two friends, Zarick and Banister, who later became the two co-founders of LayerZero.
At the age of 19, at the insistence of his brother-in-law, Bryan applied for an overseas study program in Budapest, Hungary, where he not only met his future life partner Melanie, but also saved some money by playing Texas Hold'em online, so Bryan decided to drop out of school.
Bryan then communicated with his family and expressed his hope to give himself six months to either become a professional gamer or go back to study computer science. Bryan's mother Audrey responded: "As long as you don't do anything illegal and can guarantee your ownSafetyIf you go bankrupt, you can always go home.”
From then on, until 2011, when online poker was banned in the U.S., Bryan would sit in front of his computer and play poker 70 hours a week, even when traveling abroad with Melanie, Bryan would carry his full-size console with him. During that time, Bryan became obsessed with Texas Hold'em and his skills continued to improve, and he began to be able to make quick decisions about risk and reward based on different situations within 0.3 seconds.
Bryan was living in Austin, Texas at the time, but due to the ban on online Texas Hold'em, Bryan was nominally "unemployed". Bryan then joined the sports betting website BuzzDraft and became the CEO when the company was acquired by another sports betting company shortly afterwards. At the same time, Bryan also went to Las Vegas and gradually made some reputation in the official offline Texas Hold'em competitions and earned considerable profits.
There was a small incident at this time. Around 2013, as Bryan became richer and richer, he first came into contact with Bitcoin. Then Bryan and his brothers bought computers to mine Bitcoin. However, as the price of Bitcoin plummeted in 2014, the computers Bryan usedexchangeThe result of this investment was not ideal after the collapse of a bank (unnamed, but estimated to be Mt. Gox).
Bryan then moved to Canada, where online poker was still legal, and he could continue to play online, but he slowly found himself getting more and more depressed and less interested in competition, and that year should have been a key point in Bryan's career to continue to climb. Bryan wavered, and he once recalled: "Unlike many other professional players, I am not driven by money, but I hope to seek more competitive challenges."
Finding a "more interesting" challenge
Around 2015, Bryan, who had made enough money, considered retiring. To this end, he and Melanie took their infant son to visit 12 countries in 12 months, hoping to find a suitable "retirement place", but in the process Bryan realized that he did not want to settle down.
One day, Bryan saw a DeepMind program called Agent 57 on YouTube. AI 在玩各种雅达利小游戏的视频，Agent 57 会从零开始学习各种游戏内容，并逐步实现超越人类的游戏技巧。Bryan 对此感到非常兴奋，结合自己此前在 BuzzDraft 工作时对棒球运动的接触，Bryan 就此决定利用 AI 去做一个棒球数据分析工具。
之后 Bryan 便结束了旅行，回到了温哥华定居，虽然此时距离 Bryan 经常编写代码的日子已经过去了好些年，但 Bryan 最终还是创建了一个 AI 工具，可通过数据来预测投手面对不同击球手时的表现。2016 年，美国棒球大联盟奥克兰运动家（Oakland Athletics）的知名高管 Billy Beane 给 Bryan 打了电话，购买了 Bryan 的 AI 工具，以帮助自己的球队更好的进行统计分析。
During the same period, Bryancryptocurrency的兴趣也越来越浓。2016 年末，Bryan 个人再次投资了比特币；之后 Bryan 还与曾就职于 a16z 的开发者 Daniel Chen 在 2018 年联合构建了用以启动「民主化」加密货币的编码平台 OpenToken，该平台现已被其他项目收购。
In the field of AI, Bryan made another huge breakthrough in 2020. He co-authored a research paper with Zarick and Banister (the two co-founders of LayerZero mentioned above) and Noam Brown of the Facebook AI team, describing a Texas Hold'em AI Supremus that can beat some top professional players. The paper was later cited in a game theory research paper by the Google DeepMind team.
Bryan said at the time: "I have always loved solving problems all my life, and nothing attracts me more than this."
The LayerZero Story
In the fall of 2020, the popularity of BSC also attracted Bryan's attention.
After seeing the extremely high processing speed and low transaction costs of BSC, Bryan brought in Zarick and Banister to build an NFT-based gladiatorial game that would store NFTs inSafetyIt will be built on the more agile and liquid Ethereum network, but will process transactions on BSC.
However, Bryan and others found in the subsequent game development process that they had to more or less manually transfer NFTs, but the existing cross-chain bridges at the time either did not support NFTs or were easily attacked by hackers.
At this point, Bryan and others realized that what they needed was far more than just a cross-chain bridge. Instead, they needed a basic code layer that could be used to distribute information on the chain.Blockchain之上运行，跨链桥也可以基于该层构建且确保安全，但这样的东西在加密货币领域尚不存在。
It was a tough job, but Bryan was getting more and more excited about it - because he had finally found a challenge big enough to bring a level of excitement that no poker game could ever match.
Everyone is familiar with the story that followed.
In May 2021, the first version of LayerZero's white paper was officially released.
In September 2021, LayerZero completed a $6 million Series A financing round.
In April 2023, LayerZero completed a $120 million Series B financing round at a valuation of $3 billion.
In May 2024, LayerZero officially announced that the first quarter snapshot had been completed, and raised the "knife" to the witches before the official issuance of the currency.
…
According to the timeline disclosed by LayerZero, the largest witch-purge in the history of cryptocurrency will end the “self-exposure” phase tomorrow. Bryan, who is well versed in human nature, has “fired the first shot” in this game. Let’s wait and see what will happen next.
The article comes from the Internet:From Texas Poker Genius to Witch Killer, How Did the Founder of LayerZero Become a Master of Human Nature?
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