Two well-regarded protocols born out of the 2017-2018 initial coin offering era are officially merging. Simply put, Codename: KEANU is a go.
The two projects, Keep and NuCypher, realized they faced inevitable competition that would lead to wasted energy. In what might be called a true spirit of decentralized entrepreneurship, the two decentralized encryption communities decided to combine their underlying protocols so their respective startups could proceed with separate business plans using common blockchain infrastructure.
It’s as if the Hershey and Mars candy corporations merged their factories but kept their brands in independent companies.
“The Keep and NuCypher networks have built similar technology with similar goals. Rather than splitting the market, we think we can achieve more together,” Matt Luongo, the CEO of Thesis, the company that built Keep, wrote via a spokesperson.
The merger, nicknamed Keanu in homage to the star of “The Matrix,” would mark an historic moment for the blockchain industry. As new projects started using tokens as gateways and governance tools, many observers expected mergers would be inevitable, but no one knew exactly what form they would take.
