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.
Due to the flexibility of the cleaning mechanism (using multiple designs such as "self-disclosure", "screening", and "reporting"), the strong cleaning force (it is expected that only addresses from 6.67% to 13.33% will be retained), and the precision of the cleaning strategy (more information can be derived based on the behavior patterns of the "self-disclosed" addresses).Witch),existCommunityBryan 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 In the videos of playing various Atari games, Agent 57 will learn various game contents from scratch and gradually achieve game skills that surpass humans. Bryan was very excited about this. Combined with his previous exposure to baseball when he worked at BuzzDraft, Bryan decided to use this to AI Make a baseball data analysis tool.
After that, Bryan ended his travels and returned to Vancouver to settle down. Although it had been many years since Bryan wrote code regularly, he finally created a AI A tool that uses data to predict how a pitcher will perform against different batters. In 2016, Billy Beane, a well-known executive of the Oakland Athletics of the Major League Baseball, called Bryan and purchased Bryan's AI tool to help his team better perform statistical analysis.
During the same period, BryancryptocurrencyAt the end of 2016, Bryan personally invested in Bitcoin again; later, Bryan and Daniel Chen, a developer who once worked at a16z, jointly built a platform in 2018 to start the "democratization"cryptocurrencyThe coding platform OpenToken, which has now been acquired by other projects.
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.BlockchainCross-chain bridges can also be built on this layer and ensureSafety，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?
The theme of this discussion is the combination of AI and Web3, exploring how these two fields can promote each other and solve current challenges. Compiled by: Xiaobai Navigation Coderworld Host: Matt Stephenson, Head of Pantera Research Department Guests: Jacob Steeves, Bitte…
相关文章
