My Crypto Journey
A career shift into blockchain, tokens and web3
My journey in crypto began in 2013, while living in Seattle, when I was first turned onto bitcoin. However, it began in earnest when I was hired as the VP of Blockchain (and shortly thereafter the SVP of all R&D) at Deutsche Telekom in 2017.
Leading the blockchain teams at Telekom allowed for an amazing journey into the world of decentralization. We worked with numerous protocols (bitcoin, ethereum, fabric, sovrin, IOTA, fetch.ai), startups (Jolocom, Riddle&Code, Evernym), corporations (IBM, Amazon, Commerzbank) and open source teams (Hyperledger). From all of this our blockchain team built a unique infrastructure platform that allowed any software developer to use blockchains in their system design, especially in the IoT industry. Today that system is itself a startup, called staex.
The lab at Telekom was also tightly coupled with academic research, as we partnered with teams at TU Berlin, TU Wien, Ben Gurion University in Israel, and others. Our funding went towards token economic theory and publications, the invention of blockchain systems for IoT and Telco, and overall knowledge sharing between commercial and academic teams.
Along the way, and up until the present, I have been deeply investing my time into token economics, dApps, NFTs, DeFi, SSI and more. I have strong opinions on product / user experiences, product market fit, and business models. I have also been shifting my personal life into decentralized systems.
Currently, I am an avid entrepreneur, investor and builder in web3. In the Helium (#HNT) community I am consulting with a firm building out an enterprise network of gateways; in the bitcoin community I have recently set up my own Lightning Network node and act as a router; additionally, I am newly on the board of IPDB / BigchainDB.
