as he stepped out of his car, officers say,
Sylvia startled them with an odd question:
Did they offer police protection? Rather than
explain why he felt the need to make such
an inquiry, Sylvia launched into the story of
his brief yet intense partnership with Haas.
In October 2017, while working as a
storage engineer for JPMorgan Chase in
Columbus, Sylvia had experienced what he
terms an “Office Space moment”—a sudden
realization that he could no longer let cor-
porate culture diminish his soul. His solution
to this crisis was to quit his job and start a
business that he described as having “a pur-
pose to help others.” This company would
eventually come to be known as Tessr.
Sylvia’s core idea for the startup was to
create a new kind of blockchain, a digi-
tal public ledger spread across a network
of trusted computers. He conceived of a
blockchain that could communicate seam-
lessly yet securely with all other blockchains
regardless of their origin. Over time, Sylvia
came to believe this innovation could rev-
olutionize higher education, in particular,
by simplifying basic transactions, such as
the transfer of credits between institutions.
Sylvia also envisioned a system of trans-
parent “smart contracts” under which cor-
porations would agree to buy courses for
students they wished to recruit and monitor
their academic progress on the blockchain.
Though Sylvia had two decades of IT
experience, he lacked the advanced coding
chops to create his ideal blockchain. In early
2018 he went looking for a programmer to
serve as Tessr’s lead developer. He was in the
midst of that search when he set up a meet-
ing with a web developer named Etienne
Fieri, who he hoped to enlist to help build
the tessr.io website. Fieri had heard that the
startup also had an opening for a program-
mer, so she brought along a friend of a friend
whom she’d been told was desperate for
work—a tall and slender man with icy blue
eyes and strikingly blond hair named Jerold
Haas. Immediately after shaking hands with
Sylvia, Haas flipped open his laptop and
asked, “What do you need coded?”
After marveling at Haas’ ability to solve
a slew of tricky programming challenges,
Sylvia asked him to join Tessr on the spot. He
was thrilled to have lucked into this virtu-
oso coder, and soon made him a cofounder.
“The programming language we use to write
smart contracts, Solidity? Jerold picked it up
in a day or two,” Sylvia says. “I’ve been in this
industry for 20-some years and met a lot of
brilliant people, and Jerold was one of the
best. He definitely had this extreme talent.”
Sylvia and Haas worked on Tessr in a
friend’s vape shop after hours, hacking away
at the code until they crashed from exhaus-
tion on the store’s two sofas. Haas focused
much of his labor on imbuing the startup’s
blockchain with the ability to use the newly
minted TSRX token for tuition payments. He
also helped design cryptocurrency wallets
that could be opened only with biometric
data, rather than traditional passwords; Tessr
dubbed this innovation the Bio-Key Ring.
After burning the midnight oil to code
Tessr’s framework, Haas would dive into
freelance projects to make ends meet as
he awaited his startup payday. In his rare
moments of leisure, Haas was usually in the
company of Fieri, whom he’d started dating
days after they both joined Tessr; the cou-
ple moved in together just two weeks later.
By early May, Tessr was causing a stir in
the Columbus tech scene, a community keen
to cultivate a reputation as a wellspring of
blockchain startups. (Ohio was the first state
to accept bitcoin for tax payments, a signal
of the state’s desire to foster crypto ven-
tures.) Small investors pumped in enough
cash for Sylvia and Haas to lease an office
at the Idea Foundry, a sleek tech incubator
west of downtown.
Right after settling into their new digs,
Haas and Sylvia made the rounds at
Columbus Startup Week, where they pro-
moted a presale of the TSRX token. For a few
weeks, select buyers would be allowed to
use the Ethereum cryptocurrency to pur-
chase Tessr’s tokens for the rough equiva-
lent of 10 cents each. If the token’s price rose
when the crowdsale commenced that fall,
presale customers stood to make a killing.
“Investors in the tokens get 5,000 percent
or more profits from the move,” Haas prom-
ised one potential buyer in a text message.
“It’s a really weird hack to the whole stan-
dard financial system model of investors,
stocks, etc., and I’m pretty chuffed about the
whole thing.”
Afflicted with the fear of missing out,
crypto enthusiasts scooped up tranches of
TSRX that May and June. Sylvia and Haas
discussed how their lives might change were
Tessr to become a hit. The two men professed
to have little interest in the baubles of mate-rialism, and they joked that they would cash
out of Tessr to become wandering Buddhist
monks. But Haas also bragged to friends that
he was looking forward to becoming “filthy
rich.” (Sylvia now says that Haas soon had a
change of heart: He says that Tessr canceled
its plans to sell tokens to the public in July and
that he and Haas became intent on figuring
out how to distribute free tokens instead.)
In mid-August, as the Tessr team was
scrambling to get its “educational block-
chain” out of beta, Sylvia noticed that his
business partner was becoming frazzled and
glum. Haas confided to a concerned Sylvia
that he and Fieri were having troubles. “She’s
expressed wanting to keep me for herself, but
doesn’t want to be kept herself,” Haas wrote
in one text message to a friend. “This imbal-
ance hits my Libra energy to the core.” He
also said there were people intent on caus-
ing him harm, though he didn’t name them
or offer a reason for their hostility.
Toward the end of his conversation with
Peters and Hounshell, Sylvia recounted
his last interaction with Haas, which took
place just after a Tessr board meeting held
in a suburban office park on the night of
August 30. A visibly distraught Haas con-
fronted Sylvia on one of the complex’s quiet
sidewalks. He lay down on the concrete and
moaned that Fieri’s “group” was out to get
him; he also said there was sensitive mate-
rial on his phone that he urgently needed
to delete. Sylvia had never seen his friend
so anguished, and he feared for his physi-
cal safety. Yet he wasn’t able to offer many
words of comfort before Haas took off.
Their interest in Fieri clearly piqued,
Peters and Hounshell asked Sylvia for his
opinion of Haas’ girlfriend. “He said he
does not trust her and does not like her,”
an investigator wrote in his summary of the
interview. “He described her as very rough
around the edges and didn’t get a good vibe
from her; that something was off about her.”T
HAT SAME DAY the detec-
tives met Etienne Fieri in a
Steak’n Shake parking lot.
She seemed to be shattered by
grief. Contrary to what Sylvia
told the cops, a sobbing Fieri
swore that she and Haas were
very much in love and had been “insepara-
ble” to the very end.