I have over 15 years of experience in software development, and have focused mainly on blockchain technologies since Jan 2017. I came into the space looking to help build sovereign applications and empower the community currency movement. Unfortunately, the entire crypto space seems to just replicated Wall Street without any guardrails and I am looking to find something more meaningful.
Currently, I am interested in the self-hosted and local first software movements, secure networking stacks like Tailscale and NetBird (which can really empower the aforementioned movements), and figuring out how to apply LLMs to build cool stuff without losing our humanity in the process.
I really want to step back from managing and focus more on coding again. You can look at my contributions from 2020 and 2021 to get an idea of my ability to write software when I am not simulatenously focusing on managing a team and raising funding.
However, the work in blockchain did introduce me strongly to building open source projects and there are some highlights I am proud of there:
"Father of CosmWasm" - CosmWasm is a Rust SDK to build smart contracts as well as a VM that can be easily embedded into many different blockchains. This is currently live on over 50 public mainnets, and is second to only the Ethereum EVM on the chains it supports.
Founder of Confio - I co-founded Confio GmbH in 2020 to build a team capable of delivering the vision of CosmWasm. By 2023, we grew up to 25 talented individuals all around Europe making enormous open source contributions. I had to learn lots about business and how to fund a pure open source project via grants and project work. I am proud to have gathered such an amazing team, and even more so, that they enjoyed working here. Unfortunately, the company shut down in 2025.
Early Contributor to Cosmos - You may have heard of the Cosmos Hub ($ATOM) or the 40+ connected blockchains that comprise the "Cosmos", based on IBC. I worked on the foundations in 2017-18, creating the original Cosmos SDK and writing the first working prototype and technical specification of IBC, among other things.