Tieshun Roquerre

In 2014, Roquerre moved from Boston to San Francisco to work as a full-time engineer at Teespring instead of continuing with his junior year of high school as planned.⁠[1]

He recalled that he found a job in San Francisco with a single cold email and no connections; in the acknowledgments of an essay, he thanked Teespring co-founders Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton for giving him the chance to work at the company.⁠[2]

In 2015, Roquerre left high school and founded StrongIntro, which helped technology companies hire engineers through employee referrals.⁠[1]

The Y Combinator company directory describes StrongIntro as a recruiting tool that combines software with a human-centric approach to help recruiters tap into the networks of existing employees; it lists the company as based in San Francisco with a team of two and names Fouad Matin as founder. In an essay, Roquerre thanked Matin for letting him work with him on StrongIntro.⁠[3][2]

Roquerre recalled that at 17 he went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch with StrongIntro. The YC company directory confirms the batch and lists StrongIntro as inactive.⁠[2][3]

The same year, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study mathematics and computer science.⁠[1]

In 2018, Roquerre dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to found Namebase, which provided domain registration and trading services for the decentralized naming protocol Handshake; he served as its chief executive officer.⁠[1][4]

Roquerre’s personal biography dates his Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry grant, received for Namebase, to 2019. The fellowship, created by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, gives recipients $100,000 to leave school and pursue research or build a business.⁠[1][5]

According to his own biography, Namebase raised $5 million in 2020.⁠[1]

As Handshake went live on mainnet, Roquerre appeared as chief executive officer of Namebase on CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry’s podcast The Breakdown, discussing with host Nathaniel Whittemore how Handshake works, how its domains differ from traditional web domains, why censorship-resistant domains matter, how Namebase works, and how he became interested in the field.⁠[4]

Roquerre dates the sale of Namebase to NamecheapNamecheapNamecheap is a US domain registrar and web services company founded by Richard Kirkendall in 2000. Its products include domains, hosting, email, and security services.Open the full entry to 2021. The acquisition was reported publicly in February 2022, as Namecheap used it to expand its Handshake blockchain domain business.⁠[1][6]

He recalled that around the sale of Namebase he began trading NFTs: he minted a Blitmap, held it to its all-time high of around 30 ETH and sold it, and was hooked on NFT trading afterward.⁠[5]

Namebase helped Hong Kong crypto investor Jehan Chu buy the top-level domain “.nft” on Handshake for about $84,000 (about 680,000 HNS). Roquerre, then chief executive officer, called it a record purchase; Chu also said he was an investor in Namebase.⁠[7]

As chief executive officer of Namebase, Roquerre was interviewed by Alvin Brown about Handshake-based domain auctions, the different roles of registries and domain holders, and how a decentralized domain system could coexist with the traditional web.⁠[8]

Roquerre’s personal website lists 2022 as the year he started a stealth company whose name was not disclosed, and its biography describes him as that company’s chief executive officer, aged 24; the page does not give an update date.⁠[1]

Blur, the NFT marketplace Roquerre co-founded, announced an $11 million seed round led by Paradigm, with participation from firms and individuals including eGirl CapitaleGirl CapitaleGirl Capital is a crypto investment collective made up mostly of pseudonymous members who appear on social media as cartoon characters and under assumed names. It is known for market commentary, research writing and early-stage investments, and has taken part in funding rounds for projects including Alchemix and Blur.Open the full entry, 0xMaki0xMaki0xMaki is a pseudonymous cryptocurrency developer and angel investor who served as the de facto leader of the decentralized exchange SushiSwap from 2020 to 2021 and later helped develop Heroglyphs, a protocol that rewards Ethereum solo validators.Open the full entry and LedgerStatusBrian KrogsgardBrian Krogsgard is an entrepreneur and investor based in Birmingham, Alabama. Known in crypto circles as Ledger or LedgerStatus, he co-hosts the podcast UpOnly with Cobie and co-founded the NFT platform Flip; earlier he founded and edited the WordPress industry news site Post Status.Open the full entry. The announcement said existing NFT marketplaces prioritized the retail experience and neglected the growing needs of professional traders, and that Blur aimed to bring the NFT space toward institutional grade while increasing decentralization; the team was still building privately at the time.⁠[9]

In October 2022, Roquerre and his co-founder launched the NFT marketplace Blur, initially focused on professional traders, with Roquerre taking part in the project under the name Pacman.⁠[5]

Blur’s native token BLUR launched on February 14, 2023; a week later its fully diluted market capitalization was about $3 billion. The same day, two people with direct knowledge said Blur was set to close a new round at a $1 billion valuation: the company had initially hoped to raise $15 million to $30 million at a valuation of about $700 million, and the price rose as the round became oversubscribed.⁠[10][5]

Roquerre posted a thread on X titled “Web2 me vs Web3 me,” revealing that he was Pacman, Blur’s chief executive officer. He was 24 and had used the pseudonym for 401 days. In an interview with The Block hours before the post, he said he was not hardcore anonymous but liked having the choice; the Pacman character represented only the Blur brand, and he expected that someone would eventually reveal his identity.⁠[5]

In the interview, he said Blur would follow Binance’s playbook, serving NFT natives first and then expanding to a broader market and offering; he envisioned a model like MakerDAO’s, in which sub-communities build different parts of the protocol so that the infrastructure is ultimately controlled by the community. He said what worried him most was not moving fast enough.⁠[5]

After the BLUR token launched, several data providers questioned whether much of Blur’s volume was genuine. CryptoSlam classified about $824 million of Blur trades after the February 14 airdrop as wash trading, more than 80% of about $1.02 billion in volume over the period; Hildobby’s Dune dashboard estimated that about $345 million, nearly 14% of Blur’s volume since its October 2022 launch, was wash trading. The data also showed that about half of the volume came from roughly 300 wallets. The two providers used different methods, and CryptoSlam’s founder said “inorganic trading” might be a more accurate term.⁠[11]

A Blur spokesperson responded that the company preferred analysts with well-documented methodologies, that its token incentive model rewarded liquidity rather than raw volume and drew on lessons from LooksRare, and that many analysts had misunderstood Blur’s volume.⁠[11]

Blur rewarded bidders who provided liquidity with token points, with the riskiest bids earning the most. The Block found that collections including Doodles, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki and Moonbirds had bids above their “buy now” prices; an analyst said bidders likely expected the rewards to outweigh the costs. Roquerre responded that the gap between bids and asks came from the spread and fees.⁠[12]

Blur launched Blend, a peer-to-peer NFT lending protocol developed with Paradigm’s Dan Robinson and Transmissions11. Under the white paper’s design, Blend loans have fixed rates by default and never expire: borrowers can repay at any time, and lenders can exit by triggering a Dutch auction to find a new lender; if the auction fails, the borrower is liquidated and the lender takes the collateral.⁠[13]

In April of that year, Blur captured about 48% of monthly NFT marketplace volume, with $622.3 million, slightly ahead of OpenSea’s $596.3 million.⁠[13]

After Bored Ape Yacht Club prices fell to a two-year low, many in the NFT community blamed Blur. Trevor Owens of Bitcoin Frontier Fund said Blur had spent tens of millions of dollars in airdrop incentives that pushed down floor prices; others argued that Blur’s rewards encouraged traders to over-leverage, dump and bid low, citing a cascade of liquidations on Blend.⁠[14]

Roquerre responded that since Blur’s launch some floor prices had risen and some had fallen, that the few times floors rose together were due to the liquidity injected by the airdrop, and that the recent joint drop was linked to the Azuki Elementals mint, which removed about $40 million in liquidity; he called criticism a “cost of doing business” and said blame surfaces mainly when prices fall. The same day Blur launched its second version, with a new bid type, more rewards and lower fees, without changing its incentive model. A critic called his stance delusional and said it undermined confidence in the market; others argued that traders were simply voting with their dollars.⁠[14]

Blur introduced a 0.5% minimum creator royalty, combined with airdrops based on trading activity and bidding incentives, a move seen as setting off a “race to the bottom” on NFT royalties: LooksRare and other platforms then cut royalties, and OpenSea, which had previously dominated the market and paid a 2.5% royalty, also cut its minimum fee to 0.5%. The Block reported that Yuga Labs’ quarterly royalty revenue fell from $8.7 million in the first quarter of 2023 to $2.5 million in the third quarter, and that Yuga Labs had earlier blocked trading of some of its NFTs on Blur; the report also noted that the bear market had depressed NFT sales. Blur did not respond to a request for comment.⁠[15]

Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network launched by Roquerre, opened in invite-only early access. Blast had raised $20 million in a round led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto, with participation from Flashbots strategy lead Hasu, Delegate chief executive Foobar and members of eGirl Capital, among others. Roquerre oversaw development of both Blur and Blast and said he had raised another $40 million for the Blur ecosystem, including layer-2 apps for NFTs.⁠[16][17]

Blast positioned itself as a layer-2 network with native yield: deposited ether was staked, earning about 4%, while stablecoins such as USDC, USDT and DAI were deposited in on-chain T-bill protocols such as MakerDAO, earning about 5% and returned as USDB, Blast’s auto-rebasing stablecoin, alongside “Blast Points” rewards. Roquerre posted that about $100 million in Blur’s bid pool was not earning yield, and that a new network with native yield would help avoid asset depreciation, reduce NFT transaction costs and enable NFT perpetual contracts.⁠[16]

During early access, users could not withdraw until the mainnet launch scheduled for February 2024, and the bridge funds were controlled by a five-person multisig wallet; invite points were distributed across levels of invitees and their invitees, which some commentators likened to a pyramid scheme.⁠[16]

Roquerre posted on X to address what he called “misunderstandings.” He acknowledged that Blast’s yield could feel too good to be true but said it came initially from Lido’s ether staking rewards and MakerDAO’s on-chain T-bill yield, was not unsustainable, and that Blast simply made such yield the default for every user. He said the invite rewards recognized users’ contributions to growing the ecosystem rather than being a mere marketing gimmick; that Paradigm had no involvement in Blast’s go-to-market strategy and was consulted only on research; and that Paradigm had asked for changes after the launch, which were under consideration, with the Blast team making the final call.⁠[18][19]

On November 26, Paradigm’s head of research Dan Robinson said on X that Blast’s announcement crossed lines in both messaging and execution: Paradigm disagreed with launching the bridge before the layer-2 network and not allowing withdrawals for three months, which it believed set a bad precedent for other projects, and he said much of the marketing cheapened the work of a serious team. He also said Paradigm backed Pacman and his co-founder because they had shown an ability to build great products over many years, starting with Namebase, one of Paradigm’s first investments.⁠[17][19]

On February 27, Blast announced that its total value locked had exceeded $2 billion, with 157,638 community members earning yield and Blast Points, and that its mainnet was expected to launch on February 29. By the February mainnet launch, more than $2.3 billion was locked in Blast’s bridge.⁠[20][21]

After Munchables, a game on Blast, was exploited, some suggested that the Blast team roll back the chain to recover the funds. A CoinDesk opinion piece noted that Blast was essentially maintained by a multisig wallet and cited commentators who did not see Blast as a serious decentralized network; the piece also argued that similar centralization issues were common across Ethereum scaling solutions.⁠[22]

Roquerre responded on X that about $97 million had been secured in a multisig by Blast core contributors, and said he was grateful that the former Munchables developer had ultimately returned all the funds without any ransom.⁠[23][23]

The Blast Foundation, the network’s governance organization, distributed the first-phase airdrop of 17 billion BLAST: 7% to holders of Blast Points who provided initial liquidity, 7% to users who earned Blast Gold in decentralized applications, and 3% to the Blur Foundation for airdrops to the Blur community. Under the published tokenomics, of the 100 billion total supply, 50% went to the community, 25.5% to core contributors, 16.5% to investors and 8% to the Blast Foundation.⁠[24]

The airdrop set aside about $354 million worth of tokens for users but left many disappointed; by then Blast’s total value locked had fallen about 30% from its $2.3 billion peak.⁠[21]

In a virtual Q&A at the Foresight 2024 event in Hong Kong, Roquerre said the current crypto cycle had been driven mainly by ETFs and lacked fundamental technology changes such as initial coin offerings, the launch of Uniswap or the invention of NFTs, so it had not played out like previous cycles; for the NFT market to find new adoption, someone would need to create a new twist on existing NFTs. He also said Blur was preparing its “biggest project” yet and would share details closer to launch.⁠[25]

At the time, Blast’s total value locked was $840.3 million, down from its June 6 peak of about $2.3 billion; after the June airdrop the network had been criticized for not supporting its native projects, and the memecoin Pacmoon was moving to SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry.⁠[25]

Blast announced on X that it would shut down the network, saying the cost of maintaining it exceeded the revenue generated by the layer-2 network and that it saw no credible path to economic sustainability. The team asked users to withdraw their assets, including balances in the Blast web app, to Ethereum mainnet through the regular interface by October 26; withdrawals would first pause for about a week while Blast withdrew its assets from Lido, after which the withdrawal delay would be cut to 24 hours, and after October 26 withdrawals would be possible only by interacting directly with Blast’s bridge contracts on Ethereum.⁠[21][26]

Roquerre said on X that he was disappointed the chain could not be made sustainable over the long term and thanked the users, developers and teams who helped give Blast its moment, saying its run was shorter than hoped. At the time, about $32 million was locked in Blast-based protocols, down from more than $2.2 billion in June 2024; fee revenue on the chain had fallen from $3.66 million in June 2024 to just over $2,000 in the previous month.⁠[26]

Blur announced that it would shut down its website frontend on November 12, 2026, while its on-chain marketplace protocol would keep running and the BLUR token would continue to control the protocol’s fee switch; its lending protocol Blend would stop matching new loans on the same day, borrowers would need to repay before then or let their loans default, and Blur would afterward provide a frontend tool to help users withdraw assets from Blend. Blast and Blur were developed by the same core team.⁠[27]

Blur’s monthly trading volume peaked at about $1.43 billion in March 2023 and had fallen below $7 million three years later; after the announcement, BLUR fell more than 20% to about $0.015.⁠[27]

In a personal essay, Roquerre wrote that StrongIntro ultimately did not succeed, as the team found that what it actually needed to run was a services business, which did not fit its intended technology-business direction. He used the experience to discuss startup experimentation, failure and peer support.⁠[2]

In the essay, which looks back on going through Y Combinator at 17, he summarized several lessons: YC partners often gave conflicting advice, which showed that no one knows the right answer; founders do not need industry experience to get started, citing the founders of Airbnb and Boom; the average founder age in his batch was 30, but most were also first-time founders; and Silicon Valley does not care about founders’ backgrounds, so his age was seen as a positive. He also argued that East Coast venture investors are more conservative, so fewer moonshots succeed.⁠[2]

In his blog post “Handshake Reflexivity,” Roquerre applied the concept of reflexivity, which he took from George SorosGeorge SorosGeorge Soros is an American investor and philanthropist, the founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Foundations. He is known for macro trading and for shorting the British pound in 1992, is also a major political donor on the side of the U.S. Democratic Party, and has long been at the center of political controversy and conspiracy theories.Open the full entry’s The Alchemy of Finance after finishing the book, to Handshake: market prices reflect participants’ perceptions of value, and the mutual reinforcement of perceptions and underlying value can create booms or busts. Comparing Beanie Babies and bitcoin, he argued that Handshake’s ideal path was for speculation to bring awareness and awareness to bring real usage, and that the biggest risk lay in kickstarting that process.⁠[28]

In “How Douyin Bootstrapped Its Flywheel,” he argued that Douyin’s early success came mainly from the work of its operations team rather than its recommendation algorithm: the team recruited and looked after creators by hand, controlled content visibility to shape the community’s culture, promoted themed challenges, and distributed watermarked videos on other platforms. The post cites ByteDance China chief executive Kelly Zhang and analysis by Eugene Wei and others, and ends with an eight-step playbook for building a content community.⁠[29]

On his personal website he lists books he has read or plans to read, flagging titles including The Courage to Be Disliked, Dune, Thinking in Systems, From Third World to First World and The Four Steps to the Epiphany. He wrote that systems thinking is one of the most underutilized frameworks; that The Four Steps to the Epiphany changed how he thought about marketing and launching new products; and that a quote from Deng Xiaoping in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, along the lines of never having attended university but always considering life his university, resonated with him because he never graduated from high school or college.⁠[30]

Roquerre’s personal website lists companies in which he made seed investments, including Praxis, Lattice, Italic, CourseDog and Vinovest; it does not disclose investment amounts.⁠[1]

Blur (co-founder): Official website: https://blur.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Blast (founder): Official website: https://blast.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

Namebase (founder, sold): Official website: https://www.namebase.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Personal website: https://tieshunroquerre.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: https://x.com/PacmanBlur (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

X (real-name account): https://x.com/TieshunR (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tieshun-roquerre-06181659/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

GitHub: https://github.com/troq (opens in a new window).⁠[32]