Still down the crypto rabbit hole

Building at the frontier

Andy and James started playing with blockchain tech in 2017, then started a meetup to find other curious folk. The meetup morphed into BlockRocket.tech, the company built KnownOrigin, eBay bought it, and when that chapter closed, we came back to what we actually love: building with curious people at the edge of what's possible.

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The story so far

That escalated quickly...

The short version

Community

Blockchain Manchester is born

Andy and James started meeting other curious engineers in Manchester pubs to hack on Ethereum testnets. No fund, no deck — just a recurring invite and a hunch that decentralisation was going to matter.

2015-17

2018

Foundation

BlockRocket and KnownOrigin

BlockRocket was incorporated, and — with David Moore — we launched KnownOrigin, one of Ethereum's earliest NFT marketplaces, from a Manchester basement.

Acquisition

eBay acquires KnownOrigin

James co-authored EIP-2981, now the standard for NFT royalties across Ethereum, and KnownOrigin had grown into a real marketplace. eBay came calling — Andy, James, and David joined to help shape Web3 strategy inside a Fortune 500.

2022

Today

Frontier Fridays

Back to what we love

KnownOrigin's marketplace wound down in 2024, though the NFTs themselves live on, on Ethereum. When our time at eBay came to an end, we came home to BlockRocket. Andy now runs Frontier Fridays, a weekly Manchester drop-in for anyone curious about AI, Web3, or whatever's next.

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Andy in a t-shirt with a graphic of a skull, arrow, and dripping shapes.

Andy Gray

CO-FOUNDER

Co-founded BlockRocket and KnownOrigin, then helped run Web3 at eBay. When he's not on the golf course, Andy's solving problems with people who have slightly crazy ideas. He's back coding again after working in operations for too long.

James with short dark hair and glasses wearing a dark collared shirt against a plain light background.

James Morgan

CO-FOUNDER

NFT nerd, crypto enthusiast, mostly found hacking on web3. James co-authored EIP-2981, the Ethereum NFT royalty standard now used across the ecosystem, and has spent a decade building at the edge of what's possible on-chain.