Early Bitcoin dev and proponent of Bitcoin's SegWit2x upgrade, Jeff Garzik, debuts a cryptocurrency, Metronome, which he says works on multiple blockchains
Metronome to make debut at industry conference in Las Vegas — Bloq co-founder Jeff Garzik helped develop bitcoin blockchain
Context & Ripple Effects
Jeff Garzik spent 2017 at the center of Bitcoin's civil war: as lead developer of the SegWit2x upgrade, he was the public face of the block-size compromise that followed BIP 91's activation in July. Metronome, unveiled through his company Bloq at a Las Vegas conference, is his first major project built entirely outside that fight — a token designed from day one to live on multiple blockchains rather than to scale one.
The timing is telling. Two weeks after this debut, Garzik and fellow organizers called off the SegWit2x fork for lack of consensus, leaving him with a stake in an ecosystem he no longer controlled. Metronome's multi-chain premise was later vindicated when its MET tokens could be moved directly between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic in 2019.
First-order effects
- Garzik's credibility shifts from Bitcoin protocol politics to a new asset class: Bloq now has a flagship product whose value proposition is independence from any single chain, including Bitcoin.
Second-order effects
- With SegWit2x dead on arrival, other developers weighing Bitcoin governance battles have a template for exit — build portable assets instead of fighting over one ledger's rules.
Third-order effects
- If interoperable tokens become the norm, Bitcoin's slow, contentious upgrade process becomes a talent drain: the 2024 debate over OP_CAT shows the same upgrade-bottleneck dynamic still playing out years later, while newer chains absorb the builders.
The trend: Prominent Bitcoin developers are increasingly hedging the network's governance gridlock by designing assets that are chain-agnostic from birth rather than loyal to one blockchain.