William Entriken

Mr. William Entriken Jr.
Pronunciation	/ˈɛn.trə.kɪn/
Born	William Entriken (1984-06-06) June 6, 1984
Other names	Will, Fulldecent
Education	Bennett S. LeBow College of Business, Drexel University M.S. in Finance, MBA in Investment Management
Occupation(s)	Solutions Architect, Civic Hacker, Cybersecurity Specialist, Financial Analyst, General Manager
Years active	2008–present
Known for	Pioneering the foundation of NFT eco-system
Notable work	ERC-721: Non-fungible Token Standard
Title	Lead author of ERC-721 Technical advisor to EY, TronDAO, Arianee General Manager at Pacific Medical Training
Spouse	Su Entriken
Father	Bill Entriken
Website	phor.net

William "Will" Entriken (born June 6, 1984), also known by the online moniker Fulldecent, is a solutions architect, cybersecurity specialist, financial analyst, general manager, and civic hacker best known for his contributions in blockchain technology and open sourced solutions. He is recognized as the lead author of the landmark Ethereum paper ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard, published in 2018. This paper is recognized for pioneering the foundation of the digital collectibles eco-system by establishing a programming standard called "ERC-721" to create NFTs (a type of digital “deed” to prove ownership of assets) via smart contracts on Ethereum. It also first formalized and defined the term Non-Fungible Token (NFT) into blockchain nomenclature which was made popular by the blockchain game CryptoKitties; the CTO of that game, Dieter Shirley, is also a fellow co-author of the published paper.

His contributions as a civic hacker local to his community in Philadelphia has earned him recognition including from an open source project supporting the SEPTA train system. As a cybersecurity professional, he has actively collaborated with Apple, FINRA, SEC and the FBI and currently holds an active Department of Defense Security Clearance.

Personal life & education

William Entriken was born on June 6, 1984 in the Greater Philadelpha area where he resides today. He is married to Su Entriken, and together they run a boudoir photography studio in the Philadelphia area.

Entriken earned a BS in Computer Science with Dean’s List honors from Villanova University. At Villanova he was the top scorer in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and worked in an apprenticeship where he programmed control modules for U.S. Navy Warships. He later continued his education at Drexel University, earning an M.S. in Finance and an MBA in Investment Management in 2008. He is also a member of Mensa and is fluent in Mandarin with an HSK level 4 certification.

Career

Entriken is currently the general manager at Pacific Medical Training which provides online medical training. His diverse career spans various roles across business, finance and technology including work as a solutions architect, a software developer at Google, a financial analyst for CDI Corp completing Mergers & Acquisitions, a consultant for Big Four's Ernest & Young, and a cybersecurity specialist collaborating with Apple and protecting retail investors' accounts with FINRA, SEC and the FBI.

Civic hacker in Philadelphia

Civic hackers are persons who essentially utilize or improve on technologies for public good, whether at local, municipal, national or international scales. Entriken has been noted for his contributions as a civic hacker in the Greater Philadelphia area, focusing on projects that aim to enhance public access to data and improve government accountability.

SEPTA real-time tracking

In 2008, Entriken developed a web application that compared the actual arrival times of SEPTA trains in Montgomery County to their scheduled times. He was quoted by NBC Philadelphia News as saying that the trains’ lateness was “every day and usually by 15 minutes or more.” The application was updated in 2012 to collect real-time data for 13 SEPTA regional rail lines. While SEPTA's Chief Control Center Officer acknowledged the app as "a nice little tool," he also cautioned how tracking real-time train times was “a very delicate balancing act.” Another official at SEPTA was also quoted as saying “it’s good for guidance, but that it should not be your only source for train information.”

Philadelphia traffic court data

In 2014, Entriken sought to investigate Philadelphia traffic court cases concerning "3111 violations." He was provided a quote of $11,200 by Xerox, the firm responsible for managing the court's data, as the cost to develop a program that could scan and identify all relevant cases within the database. In an attempt to cover this expense, Entriken initiated a Kickstarter campaign, but it ultimately fell short of its financial target.

EZpass “V-Toll” disputes

After incurring $300 in “V-toll” charges from the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 2019, Entriken developed a web application to simplify the appeals process for such charges and made it publicly available for others to use. The application fills in the necessary appeal forms automatically. “It’s one line of code that works on Safari and Chrome. It took me a half hour to write. It fills in the entire five pages” he was quoted as saying in the PhillyVoice. Entriken also filed Freedom of Information Act requests to analyze V-tolls over several years but was ultimately denied access to the data.

Cybersecurity

In 2020, Inc Magazine reported that William Entriken broke a non-disclosure agreement to bring attention to a cybersecurity vulnerability he allegedly discovered in 2008 at stock-trading firm Zecco (now TradeKing). Entriken claimed unauthorized trades could be initiated from accounts without the proper credentials via certain URLs. He publicly stated the firm did not address the vulnerability despite him reporting the issue.

Blockchain

Entriken has participated in the authorship of five papers known as EIP's (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), also called "ERCs" (Ethereum Request for Comment). He is most notably the lead author of ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard that pioneered the foundation of NFTs and catalyzed the digital collectibles eco-system. Entriken is also among only two other authors including Ethereum co-founder Vitalic Buterin to have successfully published an EIP in the "Informational" category via EIP-2228 and EIP-2982, respectively. Through EIP-2228, Entriken proposed a formalization of the term "Mainnet" in regards to Ethereum's "network ID 1 and chain ID 1" that had been referred to inconsistently by other names such main chain, main-net, main net and Ethereum's Main Network.

As a public speaker, he has taken the stage at conferences such as NFT.nyc, NFT Tallin and Chain76 (which he hosted).

Civic advocacy

When the United Kingdom announced plans of introducing NFTs a year prior, in response Entriken publicly offered commentary around the tax considerations involved.

In regards to environmental concerns, Entriken has advocated for the cryptocurrency industry to address its carbon footprint issues to avert going down a "destructive" path. According to the New Scientist, he expressed the need at one point for the Ethereum blockchain to switch to a consensus protocol that is much less energy demanding, known as "Proof of Stake" and stated that "Proof of work should be illegal" considering its significant energy consumption.

Entriken has publicly insisted that NFT use-cases ought to pivot more towards identity and healthcare.

He has hosted a conference called Chain76 that aims to align NFT use-cases and solutions to the pharmaceutical industry.

Book author

In 2021, Entriken self-published Nineteen Eighty-Five which is a modernized translation of the classic 1984 dystopian novel. Instead of authoring the rendition of the novel directly, Entriken authored a Perl script program to automatically replace certain keywords in the original novel with his choice of relevant modern substitutions in order to parallel the storyline with contemporary references. The book is available internationally, however, it is not available in the US due to copyright reasons.

ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard

ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard is a paper codifying a standard for non-fungible tokens on Ethereum, published in 2018 by lead author William Entriken and co-authors Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, Nastassia Sachs. It is regarded as a foundational and pioneering work that formally introduced the NFT concept, the word "Non-fungible Token" and catalyzed the digital collectibles eco-system. For clarification regarding the terminology, the term "ERC-721" may have (4) common references when used:

(1) The published paper: The peer-reviewed published paper from 2018 whose full title is ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard.

(2) The GitHub thread: The conversational threads on GitHub during the ERC drafting process prior to the paper's publication, which are still viewable today. It's important to note that, similarly to early drafts of literary works, these threads may contain ideas and discussions that did not make it into the final standard or published paper.

(3) The codified standard itself: the actual set of rules and instructions, like a recipe, that explain how smart contracts should work to effectively create NFTs, which to written in the published paper.

(4) NFTs compliant with the ERC-721 standard: Any non-fungibe tokens that are made to be compliant with the ERC-721 standard.

Formalizing and defining "NFT" in a standard

Actual use of the word "NFT" was not known prior to ERC-721 for NFT-related projects. The decision to formally include the word choice of NFT / Non-fungible Token in the final publication was made after Entriken held a vote among the stakeholders involved for the possible words they believed would be best to use in reference to the concept. The word deed was considered among other alternatives such as distinguishable asset, title, token, asset, equity, ticket.

The general purpose of NFT's in the paper centers around ownership of both physical and digital things.

NFTs can represent ownership over digital or physical assets.

— Entriken et al, ERC-721:NFT Standard

Non-fungibility's uniqueness aspect is emphasized and illustrated for its importance around the property of effective ownership.

In general, all houses are distinct and no two kittens are alike. NFTs are distinguishable and you must track the ownership of each one separately.

— Entriken et al, ERC-721:NFT Standard

The technical specification of non-fungibility in the ERC-721 standard is recognized as being defined through a token ID and contract address. As stated in the standard:

Every NFT is identified by a unique uint256 ID inside the ERC-721 smart contract.

— Entriken et al, ERC-721:NFT Standard

Through this game using ERC-721, the term NFT became first popularized in the nomenclature of digital collectibles.

ERC-721’s initial development with Dieter Shirley

Dieter Shirley, the CTO of Dapper Labs responsible for the blockchain game CryptoKitties, in 2017 initiated the creation of ERC-721 through a first draft proposal. He posted the problem of tracking non-fungibles along with a solution serving as an alternative standard to ERC-20 (a fungible token standard and the primary one used at the time). His efforts were directly inspired of the ERC-20 token and generative art project CryptoPunks.

I took a look at their smart contracts [CryptoPunks] to try and figure out what the best way to sort of generalize the concept of non-fungibility.

— Dieter Shirley, Jimbo Chats w/ ERC721 Creator Dieter Shirley About the Technical Origins and Future of Web3

Conversations about non-fungibility and the token standard issue emerged internally within Dapper Labs that motivated Shirley's initial efforts to create the first draft of ERC-721.

Everyone kept talking about ERC-20 and like ‘how do we make the CryptoKitties ERC-20 compatible’. I'm like ‘you guys are crazy, they're non-fungible, we can't make them work with the ERC-20’. And then I wrote ERC-721 first draft … then ultimately it was a community product when it was finalized,

— Dieter Shirley, ZK Podcast: CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs and Flow with Dieter Shirley

The ERC process began with very little fanfare and had limited interest initially, but after the launch of CryptoKitties in 2017, it began sparking more attention.

We put together a draft, we published it, we asked for feedback, I sent some emails to some people who you know seemed to be doing something you know sort of on similar directions. But there weren't very many so we had hardly any feedback and so no one was like saying much about it. So we published CryptoKitties and, of course, then everyone had, you know, all the all the energy in the world to nitpick our ideas and provide suggestions for how 721 should be.

— Dieter Shirley, ZK Podcast: CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs and Flow with Dieter Shirley

He reached out to Dieter Shirley, but he was occupied with CryptoKitties as it was experiencing immense growth,

He [Dieter] started this project and he had two things going on. He had CryptoKitties and the specification [paper] of telling other people how to make NFTs. And these are both cool projects and one of them kind of got a lot of attention and required a lot of work, quickly. That was CryptoKitties, it basically blocked Ethereum network... just so many people were using it, it literally just took down Ethereum... so that kind of became his focus and ERC-721 was not.

— William Entriken, William Entriken, Lead Author of ERC-721 - NFT Standard, Talks to NFT Prodigy Benyamin Ahmed

Entriken had not participated in a blockchain project prior, and he entered the ERC process during a time where there was significant lack of consensus and competing solutions for how non-fungible tokens should be standardized on Ethereum.

Upon establishing a leadership role in authoring the standard, he effectively liaisoned himself to the parties involved by offering his contact information and ensuring his availability to communicate and discuss ideas. Ultimately, the results of the collaborative efforts to iterate and improve the standard in consensus lead to the publication of ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard in 2018.

So by talking to people on the phone, making drafts constantly, I was able to navigate this, not to the best product, not to how I would have wrote it myself, not to the thing that everybody needed, but instead to the thing that had zero dissent and was good enough to publish and as fast as possible. And that was the product. Delivered fast with everybody agreeing, and it's been around and it'll be around for years and it unlocked what we got.

— William Entriken, The Genius Behind ERC-721: William Entriken on NFTs and Blockchain

See also

• NFT
• Ethereum
• Blockchain
• Hacker
• Programmer

External links

• Official Portfolio of William Entriken
• Ethereum Foundation Contributor Profile: William Entriken
• Full Decent GitHub Profile
• Full Decent Twitter