Peter Zeitz

Peter Zeitz is Research Fellow at 0x. I am an academic economist with experience in the design of blockchain consensus systems and stablecoins. From 2011 to 2013, I proposed a series of novel proof-of-stake consensus algorithms as an anonymous hobbyist. While these proposals were initially greeted with great skepticism, they have come to exercise a tremendous influence on subsequent theoretical work and in many cases have inspired developers to code their own proof-of-stake implementations. Examples of projects that implement my original proof-of-stake proposals include Peercoin (2012), Nxt (2013), Bitshares (2014), and Decred (2016). Concurrent with my work on proof-of-stake, I also proposed systems for the issuance of the blockchain derivative products now known as stablecoins. At the time, implementation of my stablecoin proposals depended on future advances in areas such as smart contracts and proof-of-stake based consensus. I found that the market was not ready for my stablecoin concepts in 2013 much as the market had not been ready for my proof-of-stake concepts in 2011 and 2012. Due to these difficulties, I shelved my research on stablecoins, keeping much of it secret and aiming to resume work once the market had matured sufficiently to fund my endeavors. With the explosion of funding for stablecoin startups over the past year, I am eager to make a move into this area, whether by joining an existing stablecoin team or organizing a new to team and launching my own venture.