Luke Stokes

Luke Stokes is the Managing Director at FIO, Hive Witness, FoxyCart.com and Co-Founder of eosDAC Custodian. An early adopter of crypto and blockchain technologies, Luke Stokes strongly believes that these emerging techs can be a mechanism for global non-violent consensus.

Luke Stokes’ main occupation is as the Managing Director for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability. He’s passionate about voluntary systems of governance and has been involved in bitcoin since early 2013. He’s been a consensus witness for the Steem blockchain since early 2018 and a custodian for eosDAC, a community-owned EOSIO Block Producer and DAC Enabler, since its inception.

With a computer science degree from UPENN, he built, bootstrapped and co-founded the shopping cart software company FoxyCart over a ten year period and is now focused on blockchain technology as a means to create a world we all want to live in.

He currently lives in Puerto Rico with his wife and three children and enjoys discussing everything from philosophy, to consciousness, to voluntaryism, to love and awakening.

Luke founded the Foundation for Interwallet Operability with other personalities in the crypto and blockchain space to realize his vision of making them a mechanism for global non-violent consensus.

The Foundation for Interwallet Operability is an industry consortium, consisting of leading wallets, exchanges, crypto payment processors, and various other entities and community members dedicated to the pursuit of blockchain usability through the FIO Protocol.

The Foundation is a Cayman-registered nonprofit and includes a Board of Directors that consist of multiple industry leaders.

Luke explains the vision behind FIO as follows: “We are trying to make crypto easier. Crypto is complicated. It’s hard to use and frustrating. I have been in blockchain since 2013. It was January 2013 when I first got started. I’m a Science major guy, so I get tech but I also get how often it’s engineers building tools for other engineers. Those are super frustrating. FIO is a human-readable address. They exist as NFTs.

It’s a two-part NFT. Stokes is the domain part. Luke@Stokes would be the crypto handle that I use to send and, importantly, receive crypto. We have the ability to request funds from someone, including an encrypted memo. That’s a feature that people are used to in the traditional financial world, and they don’t have it in traditional crypto. It’s send-only. We have this usability layer sitting on top of your experience.”

Luke Stokes is also interested in governance models and how the blockchain can revolutionize traditional methods. “I’m super interested in other governance models. For example, Eden on EOS is a fascinating exploration of an individual human being who goes through an induction process on a Zoom call much like this and they say, “I agree to the peace treaty.” Members of that community validate that they know that person in real life, “I trust that they will follow the peace treaty.” That gets minted as an NFT, put on-chain immediately, and that person becomes part of the community, and they do governance. They call it an election. You can check out More Equal Animals Dan Larimer’s book on this. You can download it for free and read it.

The idea is that those committed members of the community all have an equal vote, and they go into a political playoff process where they vote to say, “I would like this person to be able to use the committee treasury in this way, so it’s not so much a plutocracy.” I’m excited about those explorations. They often get Civil Attacked. A Civil Attack is a term where you have a whole bunch of accounts that look like 1,000 people, for example, but they are controlled by one person. They are all sock puppets. That’s another governance challenge that you run into often with these systems,” he said in a recent interview.