THE STORY SO FAR
From a Manchester meetup to the on-chain frontier.
Ten years. One community. A founding role in NFTs. A royalty standard adopted across Ethereum. An exit to eBay. And a return to the work we love.
Between 2015 and 2017, Andy Gray and James Morgan were two engineers in Manchester's nascent blockchain scene — meeting in pubs, hacking on Ethereum testnets, and trying to figure out what this technology was actually for.
They co-created Blockchain Manchester: a grassroots developer meetup that pulled engineers, founders and curious skeptics together from across the North of England. It became one of the UK's longest-running blockchain communities — and the seed-bed for everything that came next.
No fund, no founders deck. Just a recurring calendar invite and a belief that decentralisation was going to matter.
Each beat below taught us something we now apply to client work — what to build, what to avoid, and where the next ten years of decentralised systems are heading.
Andy and James co-found a grassroots meetup that becomes one of the UK's longest-running blockchain communities and a seed-bed for Northern Web3 talent.
BlockRocket is incorporated as a Web3 engineering & advisory consultancy. The same year, with David Moore, the team launches KnownOrigin — one of the earliest Ethereum-native NFT marketplaces, opening with 10 artists out of a Manchester basement.
James co-authors EIP-2981, the Ethereum Improvement Proposal that defines an on-chain interface for NFT royalty payments. It's adopted by OpenSea, Foundation and most major platforms — and becomes foundational NFT infrastructure.
In June, eBay acquires KnownOrigin in an undisclosed deal — by then the marketplace had facilitated approximately $7.8M in trade volume. Andy, James and David join eBay. James presents EIP-2981 at ETHDenver the same year.
After eBay's February 2024 layoffs, the KnownOrigin marketplace is wound down in July. Andy and James return to BlockRocket — refocusing the consultancy with the depth of having built, scaled and exited a real Web3 product.
Strategy & advisory, smart contract engineering, DeFi & self-custody onboarding, and education — for enterprises, founders and the people who actually hold value. Andy now runs Frontier Fridays, a weekly Manchester drop-in for builders across AI, Web3 and biotech.
Most NFT royalty payments on Ethereum still flow through a standard James co-authored from a desk in Manchester. That's what battle-tested infrastructure looks like — quiet, durable, everywhere.
KnownOrigin opened with 10 artists and a contract on Ethereum mainnet. It pre-dated the mainstream NFT boom by years and grew into one of the most respected crypto-art marketplaces in the world.
Along the way the team raised venture capital, scaled a decentralised marketplace under real user load, and shipped infrastructure — like EIP-2981 — that the rest of the ecosystem still builds on.
When eBay came knocking in 2022, the team led the platform through acquisition and joined to help shape a global Web3 strategy from inside a Fortune 500 company. Few consultancies can say they've done that.
BlockRocket today is a small, senior team applying a decade of battle-tested experience to the projects that benefit most from it. If any of the above sounds like the kind of partner you've been looking for, we'd like to hear from you.
