Yu Pan was one of the six co-founders of PayPal and the first engineer at YouTube. He’s now working as an R&D Engineer at Origin Protocol. In this video, Yu Pan shares why he joined the Origin team and what he enjoys most about the culture.
If you’re interested in being part of the Origin team and getting to work alongside Yu Pan and our other absurdly talented engineers, we’re hiring!
Origin has an untraditional application process. As an open-source project with over 150 contributors, we hire almost exclusively from our community. There are no white-board interviews. The best way to get our attention is to jump into our Discord, join one of our weekly engineering calls, pick an issue from our public project board and send us a pull request.
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Foundation Capital is a well-known venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. They have built their reputation from investing in highly successful startups like Netflix, Rappi, and LendingClub. They have also invested in a number of companies focused on the sharing economy, including the ride-sharing giant, Uber. As an investor in Origin, Foundation Capital is now betting on a better, decentralized future for the sharing economy.
Rodolfo Gonzalez is a partner at Foundation Capital and recently recorded a video sharing why they decided to invest in Origin. In this video, Rodolfo talks about the history of marketplaces, how Origin fits into Foundation Capital’s thesis for the future, and why decentralized marketplaces like Origin are inevitable.
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Continuing with our video series, we sat down with Doo Wan Nam from MakerDAO to discuss how Origin uses the Dai stablecoin to allow buyers and sellers to transact on the Origin marketplace without worrying about price volatility. Doo is in charge of Asia Partnerships and is the Korea Lead for MakerDAO.
We launched our support for the Dai stablecoin in April of this year. Since then, hundreds of sellers have taken advantage of the ability to sell their goods and services without having to speculate how Ethereum’s price might change in the comings days or months. The ability to accept Dai has proven to be particularly valuable for listings that are delivered long after the initial booking (ex. home shares) as well as goods that have a clear fiat denominated value (ex. gift cards).
You can view the video here.
We’re happy to be working with the MakerDAO team. Thanks Doo for your support!
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This article was originally written in August 2019 and may contain outdated information.
Today, decentralized applications (DApps) that use blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are still held back by poor user experiences. For example, DApps oftentimes require users to go through onerous onboarding processes (e.g. installing web3-enabled wallets, backing up recovery phrases, spending gas to write data to the blockchain) before getting to the core product offerings. As an industry, we will need to build end-user DApps that abstract away much of this complexity, making them feel more similar to traditional centralized applications in simplicity and delightfulness.
At the same time, these DApps need to preserve the main tenets of web 3.0 (e.g. self-sovereign identity, data portability, trustless transactions) that are oftentimes difficult to explain to new users. There are many product and design challenges that we need to overcome before DApps are taken seriously by mainstream users.
That is why I’m so excited to announce that Aure Gimon has joined Origin full-time as our lead product designer. Aure and I first met two years ago in the very first month that Josh and I decided to pursue Origin. At the time, we were looking for a part-time designer that could iterate quickly with us on our whitepaper, pitch deck, and corporate website. We had just feverishly built our MVP and were about to engage with the community and begin our initial fundraising process.
Fast forward to today, and every part of Origin’s product and marketing materials has Aure’s fingerprints all over them. Aure’s product design excellence has enabled us to unveil our recently relaunched mobile applications and web DApp. Aure also led the charge in making Origin Rewards an easily understood but pivotal part of our platform offering. While he spends most of his time on product design, he also moonlights by creating all the designs for our meetups, social media, and swag.
Until recently, Aure was doing all of this while juggling multiple other clients. Now that Aure has joined full-time as a “10x designer”, we cannot wait to see what he comes up with next. However, it’s not just Aure’s work output that I hold in high regard. Aure’s true strengths center around his ability to identify and empathize with both users and the engineers that are building our platform. As a former engineer himself, Aure understands many of the nuanced challenges that our team of world-class software engineers face when building new decentralized infrastructure and applications.
The best products are ones that mask all the complexity that is happening behind the scenes, and Aure has an uncanny skill for only showing users “the tip of the iceberg”. That is precisely what is needed as we continue building out our product offering to attract mainstream users, many of which have little to no understanding of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
Here are a few fun facts about Aure:
Aure is a huge fan of Japanese culture, especially Japanese whiskeys.
In just the past 2 years, Aure has helped a handful of startups and venture capital funds raise well over $200M with his pitch decks.
He was born and raised in Venezuela and has a unique perspective on how cryptocurrencies can be used to combat hyperinflation and broken economic systems in emerging markets. He’s been active in helping Origin make an impact in Venezuela.
If you are interested in joining the Origin team as a product designer or engineer working alongside Aure, please get in touch. Please join me in welcoming Aure to the Origin family. It’s been a long time coming!
Learn more about Origin:
Buy Origin Tokens (OGN): binance.com
Learn more on our website: originprotocol.com
This article was originally written in August 2019 on Medium. Some information may be dated.
When building technology startups, one of the best predictors for long-term success is the strength of the core team. Even as product development and market conditions can change unexpectedly over time, a highly-functioning, mission-driven team can adapt, ship product, and pivot its way to eventual success.
In this video, Steve Chen, the co-founder and CTO of YouTube shares the story of what it was like working with three of Origin’s core team members in the early days of YouTube. My co-founder, Matt Liu, was one of the first product managers at YouTube. Yu Pan was the very first engineer at YouTube. Franck Chastagnol was one of the first engineering managers. Together, they played a huge role in YouTube’s early success. And today, all three of them are now dedicating their time to working on Origin Protocol.
As Steve said, we have a herculean hurdle to overcome in order to bring this platform to the masses. We’re grateful to have an experienced and talented team tackling these challenges. We’re also thankful to have the support of countless people like Steve cheering us on.
Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing regular videos from more of our investors, employees, advisors, partners, and friends in the industry. Stay tuned!
We are excited to announce that Mike Shultz has joined the Origin Protocol engineering team full time!
In our quest to build an amazing product we are always open to new open source contributors jumping in and having a go at some of the issues open on our GitHub repository. We’ve continually found that this is a great way to discover new team members who are willing to roll up their sleeves and get familiar with our stack. This is how we found Mike.
Hailing from Montana, Mike got his start with Origin by getting an early iteration of our mobile app up and running on Android, a task which he completed admirably, despite it being a bit out of his comfort zone. From there, he has progressed to more familiar ground, working in a backend and DevOps role. He helped us debug and diagnose some issues with our blockchain event listener and more recently developed a tool to improve transaction parallelism in our meta transaction relayer. We’ve recently pushed this to our production servers, and the work he did here has been invaluable.
Like a lot of the team, he was attracted to Origin’s openness. We take a lot of pride in our open-source and “public by default” heritage. He decided to join us full time because, in his own words, “the team here is on another level and is creating something that will have a large impact on the Ethereum ecosystem.”
Mike has a varied work history. He held a position as Director of IT for Project Vote Smart, whose mission was to provide unbiased information about candidates for public office. This position was based in the Montana wilderness, 25 miles from the nearest town, and involved encounters with bears, moose, badgers, and 8-foot snowdrifts. He describes the commute as “simultaneously amazing and horrifying”. Search and rescue was called to recover several interns during his time there. Fortunately for future interns, he migrated their server infrastructure to AWS during his tenure. Origin Protocol should be a breeze in comparison.
Managing Servers in the Montana Wilderness
Mike has created an innovative Python package called Solidbyte, which is a development tool for creating Ethereum smart contracts using Python. We thought this was really cool. Who doesn’t want to deploy and interact with smart contracts in Python?
Mike is a tinkerer and spends his spare time messing with whatever he can get his hands on: engines, electronics, bikes, you name it. We are very pleased to welcome him to the Origin team!
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Shahul’s path to joining Origin, or his “Origin story”, is a great example of a little bit of everything that makes Origin special.
We are excited to announce that Shahul Hameed, our first engineer in Asia, has joined the Origin Protocol family!
Shahul is based in India, near Chennai, and has already contributed to every aspect of our platform, from the front-end and back-end to our smart contracts. He is currently working on improving the user experience of our DApp with gasless meta-transactions.
Shahul started programming at age 10 and began his career as a freelancer. He comes to Origin most recently from Zoho, where he was a front-end developer. He has also published several of his own applications on the Windows Store and Windows Phone Store.
Shahul’s path to joining Origin, or his “Origin story”, is a great example of a little bit of everything that makes Origin special. Our Head of Partnerships, Coleman, reached out to Shahul on Reddit because Shahul had been trying to buy Amazon gift cards for ETH on /r/giftcardexchange. Coleman was conducting research on how and why people trade crypto for gift cards. It turns out that Shahul is a huge Pokémon fan and was looking to buy a Nintendo Switch so he could play Pokémon Let’s Go. Unfortunately, the Nintendo Switch was not available in India yet, so Shahul needed to obtain American Amazon gift cards to purchase it. Cryptocurrencies helped him solve this problem.
Coleman told Shahul about the Origin Marketplace DApp and Shahul started poking around our GitHub. He picked up some “good first issues” on our project board and immediately began solving problems for us, without pay or any official relationship to us. Shahul’s rate of work increased and our engineering team started to take notice of this new open source contributor. We reached out to him to get him more involved and soon hired him as a contractor. Shahul’s code was exceptional and he developed an immediate rapport with our team. We asked Shahul to join the Origin team as a full-time engineer shortly after. To our delight, Shahul had been looking to work on an open-source blockchain project for quite a while and accepted our offer!
In addition to his passion for coding and Pokémon, Shahul is also an excellent Rubik’s cube speedsolver, averaging under 15 seconds. He can also solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. Shahul also is an avid blogger and YouTuber. We are lucky to have such an exceptional and multi-talented person to join our team!
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In August last year, we announced the addition of a new decentralized messaging system to the Origin platform. We knew it was important for buyers and sellers to have a way to communicate with each other, whether to answer questions about a product or to communicate sensitive details after an offer is accepted. When designing our messaging system, we wanted to provide the fast & free experience that users have come to expect from modern messaging platforms, without compromising on security.
Since our initial launch, we’ve had the chance to reevaluate some of our initial design decisions. We received a lot of feedback from our users that our messaging system was not as fast and reliable as we had hoped. One big challenge in our design was our reliance on OrbitDB, which is a distributed, peer-to-peer database that runs on IPFS. We still love the idea of enabling trustless messaging without any centralized servers involved, but our OrbitDB implementation didn’t scale. As our DApp has gotten more usage, our messaging system has become increasingly less reliable. Our plan was to eventually implement sharding, but we came to the conclusion that OrbitDB is probably just not a good fit for our particular use-case.
Meanwhile, our views have shifted in what features matter most for messaging on a decentralized platform. We originally started with the assumption that messages should be saved forever and we were storing them on IPFS, which aims to be the “permanent web”. Today, we’re less convinced that level of persistence is desirable. We’ve had a hard time coming up with reasons why you need your messages to be recorded for all eternity. In many cases, there’s a good argument for why your messages should be ephemeral or at least easily deletable. We’re not alone in our thinking. Mark Zuckerberg recently cited “reducing permanence” as one of the design goals for Facebook’s future privacy-focused messaging system.
In conversations with our users, we consistently heard that they valued performance and reliability over decentralization. What matters most is not how the messages are transported from one computer to another. The important thing is that the messages are encrypted end to end, meaning they are encrypted in the sender's browser and stay as unintelligible 1’s and 0’s until they reach the recipient's browser where the original message is decrypted. This means you only need to trust a relayer to forward along the message, but your privacy will not be compromised even if the relayer turns out to be malicious or is even given a court order to reveal your conversation.
In the interest of having reliable, performant messaging, we’re switching to a relayer model where messages sent in the Origin DApp will be forwarded to the recipient via centralized servers. These relayer servers are currently operated by Origin as a community service. While this means we now have the power to delete messages, we’re using the exact same encryption scheme as before, so we can’t read them unless the buyer or the seller invites us to join the conversation. Since we’re using the same encryption scheme, we were able to import all the previous messages that were stored on OrbitDB into a good old fashioned database, which we’ll be using going forward. The end result is that our DApp loads a lot faster and our messaging system is a lot more reliable.
This is unlikely to be the final update for Origin Messaging. We’re continuing to research ways to make our messaging system more decentralized and trustless, while still offering the features and functionality that users care about. We also know there are other teams working on similar challenges and we’ll be following their progress as well. We’ll keep you updated with any developments or future changes to our platform.
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We are excited to announce that Domen Grabec has joined the Origin Protocol engineering team!
Domen is based in Slovenia and will be joining our growing team of engineers that are contributing to Origin Protocol around the world. Having a truly distributed team comes with collaboration challenges. The culture of “public by default” and open-collaboration helps tremendously. At Origin, we have all our discussions in public in Discord, publish our engineering meeting notes to the world, track our progress on a public project board, and invite anyone to join our weekly engineering calls.
Domen started as an extended team member last year and since then has had an impressive impact on several different projects. His first project was to build search capabilities for our DApp. Then Domen took on an initiative to improve our DApp’s mobile user experience. Currently, he is busy implementing growth initiatives that we’ll be announcing soon. These contributions clearly demonstrated his abilities to move fast and operate at any level in our stack.
Domen has solid and diverse industry experience under his belt. Prior to Origin, he worked at Celtra, an advertising IT company, where he was part of the team responsible for a Big Data pipeline using Scala and Spark clusters to process hundreds of GB of data daily. Prior to that, he partnered with two Slovenian Chess Grandmasters to create an iOS and Android app where users can play simultaneous chess with Grandmasters. He is also famous for contributing to a significant number of people’s loss of productivity when he implemented and released an iOS game called Pigs!
During his free time, Domen enjoys dancing Salsa. He is part of an amateur group that performs a few times a year on stage. Rumor is that once, during warmup before a performance, Domen managed to pull off doing five consecutive perfect pirouettes!…but alas nobody was there to witness his prowess.
Domen is an avid hiker; his home country of Slovenia provides an abundance of mountain trails. In the summertime, he wakeboards, practicing 720 degree jumps.
In his own words, here is why Domen is excited to join our team: “Origin Protocol ticks a lot of the boxes for me when it comes to what is important in a company. It is an open source codebase and has a transparent collaboration process. The team is highly skilled and enjoys working on tough challenges.”
We’re looking forward to working with Domen on building amazing products at Origin Protocol. Please join me in welcoming him to our team!
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