Matt Hall is a software engineer and entrepreneur based in New York City. He’s best known for co-founding CryptoPunks, the first PFP NFT collection. He currently works as a Partner at Larva Labs via Google Creative Lab.^[1][2] With John Watkinson, he was named in Coindesk's Most Influential 2021.^[4]

Career

He co-founded Larva Labs in 2005 with John Watkinson, the company behind CryptoPunks. He is also a co-founder of Choon, the largest blockchain music platform with over 20,000 tracks uploaded since its launch in 2018. In his over 20 years as a software engineer, Matt has launched successful apps on both iPhone and Android and has worked for major tech companies such as Google and Microsoft.^[1]

He describes CryptoPunks as an experiment, where he and Watkinson were exploring a pixel character generator, and eventually had the idea to make these characters unique and ownable on the Ethereum blockchain. From both technical and psychological perspectives, it was uncertain whether the idea would be successful.^[3]

The technical questions were around how best to represent the art on the blockchain and whether we could make the experience easy enough to use that people would actually buy and sell them. The psychological question was whether people would feel like they even owned something under this system. When you have a painting on the wall you feel confident you own a piece of art, it wasn’t clear the same would be true of ownership of digital art recorded on a blockchain.

Before starting Larva Labs, Matt worked as a software engineer at several tech companies, including Agency.com and Modus. He has a strong background in computer science and has experience working with a variety of programming languages, including Python, Java, and C++.^[2]

• Partner at Larva Labs (October 2005 - present)
• Co-founder at Docracy (September 2011 - October 2018)
• Senior Software Engineer at Columbia University Medical Center (June 2005 - June 2007)
• Senior Software Engineer at Modus (2002 - 2005)
• Software Engineer at Agency.com (May 2000 - April 2002)

Education

Matt Hall graduated from the University of Toronto, with a degree in Computer Science and Math.^[2]