Hey, we publish our cap-table at /.well-known/captable.json as defined in YCRFC-21. You can just scrape it and remember to check against your LEI.
The ideas here are good, and the problems might be real for large investors - but this is yet again throwing Ethereum at a solution as a global spreadsheet.
The blockchain gives you the ability to make a shared interface, a shared DB, and a way to audit whenever someone changes the interface or the data.
I could give you a dozen examples of someone just "throwing the internet" at some problem 20 years ago... Spotify just throws the internet at music distribution, etc...
Those companies have turned out to be extremely valuable because they all solve real pain points of actual users and Balaji is a highly knowledgable investor who experiences this actual pain point so I wouldn't downplay this as throwing blockchain at anything and everything...
- Balaji Fan
He's asking investment-companies to implement Ethereum inter-op, with significant investments in key-management,security, and regulatory risk.
These companies could just come up with a standard instead? With significantly lesser investment (you don't have to worry about running a node or managing keys, or running a sync operation - you just publish your data in a "well-defined format"). All it takes is one company to start offering this (say Cava), and the others must follow suit to stay around and remain competitive. Maybe cava or Angel List could host your definitive captable and company.com/captable.json just does a redirect to angel.co/company/captable.json.
A lot of the well-known URIs come from companies (and groups of them) deciding that a common standard might be helpful: https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-....
You'll find the same challenges even in the Ethereum space. Maybe some company wants to use Solana instead - now your captable can be published in multiple blockchains, with perhaps different token implementations (ERC-20 vs 721?).
It's not like you get "standardization-for-free" with ethereum - companies still have to decide on it and get it right.
>How do you know someone didn't tweak some of the logic or change some info in their DB?
You have the same risk with what he's proposing. The keys are with the org, and he explicitly calls out for mistakes being correctable by creating a new captable from scratch (against perhaps even a new address). The data at the end of the day is "mirrored" from what is reality, and as such will always be as trustworthy as you deem the person who's controlling the keys to be. It's just that the keys change from "ethereum wallet key" to "server-TLS-key-for-company.com". I'd argue that the latter is better since the domain name is usually the primary identifier for the company (and not company.eth)[0]
Balaji might be a highly knowledgable investor, but he also has a significant stake in crypto companies so he has a high incentive to push for these use-cases without considering the alternatives.
[0]: Amazon.eth is on sale!