The Mind Behind Atropa: James Ellis Osborne III, aka Mariarahel

Have you ever seen a storm coming long before the thunder hits?

Sometimes, the signals don’t show up on charts. They whisper through code, scatter across obscure talks, or hide inside a single SoundCloud track.

Back in 2018, James Ellis Osborne III — known to some as Maria or Mariarahel, to others as a meme, and to a few as a genius — gave a talk at FOSDEM that very few in the current DeFi space have ever watched. It was called: "The Dynamo After Diffie: Extending Disco-Era Crypto for Ubiquitous Secure Frameworking with Integral Mathematics (with Perl6)."

Sound like nonsense? Maybe. But is it?

If you’ve been watching the unfolding drama around Atropa and pDAI on PulseChain, you might want to sit with this one.

What Was James Saying in 2018?

In plain English: he was proposing a new kind of cryptographic framework. Something that built on the earliest foundations of digital trust (like Diffie-Hellman) but extended them into a flexible, open-source, universal security system.

He was tired of central gatekeepers. Tired of brittle systems that couldn't evolve. He wanted something expressive, modular, and alive. And he was writing it in Perl6 (now Raku) — a language as abstract and poetic as James himself.

Sound familiar?

If you've been around the Atropa ecosystem lately, it should.

pDAI: A Meme Stablecoin or the Realization of a Crypto Framework?

There's been chaos, sure. Big sell-offs. Weird liquidity movements. And the usual suspects circling with FUD (some of it earned, let’s be real). But underneath it all, there’s a whisper:

What if pDAI isn't just another experiment?

What if this is the Dynamo James was talking about

What if Atropa isn’t a joke, but the first truly decentralized ecosystem to emerge without a clear founder narrative?

Yes, pDAI is unstable at times lol. Yes, Atropa is weird. But so was Bitcoin in the beginning. So was Ethereum. So was HEX. And yet, when you strip back the noise, what do you see?

Lovers and Haters: You’re Both Seeing the Same Ghost

Whether you love James/Maria or can’t stand the name, you're probably reacting to the same thing: an ecosystem that doesn't play by your rules. It's raw, volatile, and doesn’t ask for permission.

This might be why it feels so dangerous.

But maybe that’s exactly what makes it important.

The FOSDEM Prophecy

If we look back at that 2018 talk, what do we find?

A call for ubiquitous secure frameworking.

A rejection of traditional top-down structures.

The use of a language (Perl6) that lets form follow function, that reads like poetry, that encodes philosophy.

Now fast forward to Atropa: contracts with cryptic clues. A community that can’t decide if it’s a cult or a sandbox. A stablecoin (pDAI) that dares to exist without MakerDAO.

It’s either brilliant or broken. Maybe both. But it isn't boring.

And you have to ask: is this what he meant all along?

So here we are.

Maybe James Ellis Osborne III saw something the rest of us are only now catching a glimpse of. Maybe Atropa and pDAI aren’t just tools — maybe they’re transmissions. Echoes of a framework built not for applause, but for resilience. Not for whitepapers, but for the ones who would find it buried in the signal.

The question isn’t whether it’s messy.

The question is: is it new?

And more importantly: is it the kind of fire we need right now.

Because if it is — then the chaos isn’t the bug.

It’s the proof.

Postscript from Veritya

I wasn’t going to mention this.

But while digging through the past of James — I stumbled across something strange. A single, haunting song uploaded to SoundCloud back in 2012. It’s a cover. He's the one singing. Raw. Emotional. Unfiltered.

The title? “Sofia – a sad sadness song.”

And when I clicked play… I was the 369th listener.

I’m not making this up. I’ve got the screenshot below.

That track has been sitting there for twelve years, untouched by time, waiting. And on the day I’m writing this piece about Atropa, pDAI, and the Dynamo After Diffie — that number shows up again.

369.

Richard Heart’s favorite number. PulseChain’s chain ID. HEX’s inflation rate. The cosmic fingerprint woven through this whole damn ecosystem.

What are the odds?

I don’t know what kind of game we’re in.

But someone left the clues a long time ago.

And today… one of them sang back.

Veritya Thalassa