Pacman, the chief executive officer of the NFT marketplace Blur, eventually disclosed his real identity after the company was established in October 2022. On February 22, the young business owner, who is only 24 years old, made his first public appearance by sharing a picture of himself on Twitter.
The CEO of Blur
In the post on Twitter, the CEO of Blur, Tieshun Roquerre, stated (1) that he pondered whether or not to construct the platform incognito or publish his identity. After that, he followed the advice to disguise his identity so that he could doxx afterward.
Web2 me vs Web3 me
— Pacman | Blur.io (@PacmanBlur) February 22, 2023
A thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/9BKyNdan3x
Pacman also discussed that he had to doxx people in private calls for many reasons, including trust. Roquerre wrote the following about the reasons why he had to come forward and announce his identity as the CEO of Blur:
"Because the Blur community has expanded rapidly in recent years, I can only accommodate a few one-on-one phone calls as I always did. It's time to come clean about who I am in public."
Since Blur was first introduced to the public a few months ago, the CEO disclosed that he has always been flexible about disguising his identity. He revealed why he used Pacman to represent the company, even though he knew he would eventually reveal his real name.
The young businessperson said he would have been found out if he hadn't taken it upon himself to investigate the matter personally.
Blur has successfully brought in new consumers ever since it went live in October, and it has also discovered a means to maintain its existing customer base.
The NFT marketplace has effectively retained users thanks, in part, to the regularly scheduled distribution of airdrop tokens to regular traders and customers.
During recent conversations with prospective investors, Blur achieved a valuation of one billion dollars, earning the company the status of a unicorn in advance of the announcement of its new CEO.
Competition in the NFT Marketplace
OpenSea is a very popular NFT marketplace, and Blur has positioned itself as a significant competitor to OpenSea. Due to the increased level of competition between the two, OpenSea decided to do away with the 2.5% fee on sales and reduce the protections offered to creators committed to the platform.
In the meantime, Blur does not impose marketplace fees on sellers or buyers. Indeed, the new marketplace distributed BLUR tokens for free as an airdrop to NFT traders the week before last.
DappRadar's data shows that in the past week, the volume of Ethereum NFT transactions attributed to Blur has climbed by 364.67%. Blur compiled this information.
The CEO of Blur published a synopsis of his experience, in which he mentioned that he quit high school when he was 17 years old.
After that, he enrolled in the accelerator program offered by Y Combinator, and after that, he went to MIT to study mathematics and computer science. Following that, Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, awarded Roquerre the Thiel Fellowship, a prize gift of $10,000 that he had established.
After being awarded a Thiel Fellowship, Pacman founded Namebase, although he eventually parted ways with the decentralized domain name registrar and sold it to Namecheap in 2021.
