Patrick Byrne is so certain about the technology’s possibilities, he’s planning to sell Overstock’s retail business. In August 2015, Overstock’s chief exec Patrick Byrne rented out Nasdaq Times Square broadcast studio for a lavish party to unveil his newest project, a blockchain-based trading system called tZero. Three years later, tZero still hasn’t launched commercially, and it is burning through millions of dollars a month. Yet Byrne is staking his company’s future on it and more than a dozen other blockchain startups.
