 Beginning with a whitepaper published online in January 2012, J.R. Willett described the possibility of building new currencies on top of the Bitcoin Protocol.Willett went on to help implement this idea in the cryptocurrency "Mastercoin", which had an associated "Mastercoin Foundation" (later renamed the "Omni Foundation") to promote the use of this new "second layer".The Mastercoin protocol would become the technological foundation of the Tether cryptocurrency, and one of the original members of Mastercoin Foundation, Brock Pierce, would become a co-founder of Tether.