This article was originally written in 2018. Information below may be dated.
We are excited to announce that Nick Poulden has joined as the newest member of Origin Protocol’s engineering team. Nick started out as an open-source contributor and has already made multiple significant contributions to the Origin platform. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome him into his new role as a Senior Engineer at Origin. Nick is based in Colorado and will be joining Stan and others working out of our Boulder office.
As a 100% open-source project, Origin Protocol has always taken a unique approach to hiring from within our community. We prefer to skip the whiteboard exercises and instead evaluate people based on their contributions to the real problems our team is grappling with every day. This has led to us hiring a diverse group of people from all over the world, including many who don’t have a typical software engineering resume. Part of our secret to finding great people is that we don’t just open-source our code, we open-source our collaboration process as well. Everything we do is “public by default”. This culture of open-collaboration makes it easy for new developers to see what we’re working on and start contributing. At Origin, we have all our discussions in public in Discord, we 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. Without this culture of openness, it’s unlikely we’d have ever found Nick or had a chance to evaluate his unique skills.
Nick Poulden on a recent visit to Origin HQ
Nick grew up in England and studied Computer Science at the University of Warwick. Prior to joining Origin, he worked as an engineer at Sencha, C3 Energy Network and most recently at Palo Alto Networks. We’ve been impressed with his skills as a JavaScript developer, his ability to pick up new languages like Solidity and his burning desire to explore new technologies. Outside of work, Nick enjoys traveling and loves to get outdoors to enjoy Boulder’s 300 days of sun. He particularly loves skiing through trees, listening to psychedelic space rock and speculating about the future over a good bottle of wine. He’s on a never-ending search to find an Indian restaurant in the US that lives up to UK standards. Nick was the tech lead for The Leaky Cauldron, JK Rowling’s favorite Harry Potter fan site when it won a Webby award in 2006. You can find him on Github with the simple and enviable handle of @nick.
We first discovered Nick in January of this year. He’d started playing around with blockchain development in December and had forked Origin’s DApp to create his own marketplace for selling tickets. He met up for coffee with Stan who immediately flagged him as a rockstar that we should try and recruit to our team. From the beginning, it was obvious that Nick shared our mission and was a top-notch engineer. Nick started by making several great open-source contributions to our codebase and has slowly gotten more and more involved with our team. Little did we know that it would take us almost a year to convince Nick to give up his full-time job at Palo Alto Networks.
Even before joining full-time at Origin, Nick made significant contributions to our codebase. Nick was the engineer who took the initiative to investigate the ERC-725 identity standard which became the basis for public profiles on Origin. Nick built the first working prototype of the ERC-725 standard and helped integrate that standard into our DApp.
Nick also designed and wrote our current marketplace smart contract which is central to the operation of our platform. You can think of our marketplace contract as the digital town square where buyers and sellers can find each other. It also provides the rules that govern how funds are escrowed and transferred between parties, and how arbitration works if anything goes wrong.
Nick also championed the initial use-case for our token, whereby sellers can “boost” their listings to get them more visibility and give an incentive to marketplace operators to help promote them. While we plan on adding additional use-cases for our token over time, Nick was able to convince us that this simple affiliate model was a great place to start.
As you can see, Nick has already had a sizeable impact on our product and we’re incredibly grateful for the engineering leadership that he has shown. We’re looking forward to working with him over the years to come and seeing whatever crazy ideas he comes up with next. Nick is already an indispensable part of the Origin team and we are excited to finally make it official. Please join me in welcoming Nick to the Origin team!
Learn more about Origin:
This article was originally written on Medium in 2018. Information below may be out of date.
At Origin Protocol we believe in bringing together the best parts of the “traditional” startup world with the most exciting and innovative parts of the blockchain world.
Trusted axioms for hiring the very best, moving fast and breaking things, constantly shipping code, and having a maniacal focus on serving customers are just as true today as they were in the web 1.0 and 2.0 worlds.
In our quest to disrupt the way that global marketplaces function (removing intermediaries and making them truly peer-to-peer), we can draw from the experience and learnings of the best companies from the first waves of the Internet. One of the best ways to emulate these highly impactful companies is to work with and learn from the people that built them from the ground up.
Today, I am excited to announce that Yu Pan has joined Origin as lead research and development engineer. Yu Pan began his career as founding engineer at PayPal and later was the very first employee at YouTube. He developed many core parts of PayPal’s payments and auction infrastructure. He also built the YouTube embedded video player that kickstarted the video-streaming platform’s explosive viral user growth (first on MySpace then elsewhere). Yu Pan’s experience also includes founding multiple startups and serving as CTO to others. He also recently was integral in building payment/credit service Affirm’s integrations with multiple ecommmerce platforms, enabling millions of users to more easily transact via non traditional payment channels. To say that he has seen it all and amassed an invaluable set of software engineering, product development, and “intangible” startup skills is an understatement.
Who is that “crazy” guy in the middle?
Throughout his career, Yu Pan has used his hacker mentality and creative thinking to kick-start projects that have led to widespread user adoption. Yu Pan has always looked for opportunities that can create seismic shifts in consumer behavior, especially in commerce and finance. He’s passionate about emerging decentralized technologies and the ability to impact Internet users across the world. Yu Pan will be focusing on engineering and product explorations for Origin’s mobile initiatives as well as working on user growth strategies.
Beyond being a battle-tested entrepreneur and software architect, Yu Pan brings forth a genuine, biased-to-action, and “brilliantly crazy” personality that makes him an ideal fit within Origin’s engineering team.
In 2006 when I started my career as an inexperienced and unproven product manager at YouTube, I met Yu Pan and forged the beginnings of our friendship and working relationship. Despite being significantly more senior and experienced than me, he was always supportive, patient, and humble. I count him amongst the friends and colleagues at YouTube that helped me grow as a product leader and entrepreneur.
Today I feel extremely blessed that we get to team up again and go for round two. The rest of the Origin team is equally excited. Please join me in welcoming such a strong addition to the already fantastic Origin team.
Celebrating at Yu Pan’s wedding with the YouTube team
If you’re passionate about what we are building at Origin and want to work alongside amazing coworkers like Yu Pan, please reach out. We’re eager to hear from you.
Learn more about Origin:
This article was originally written on Medium in 2018. Information below may be outdated.
I’m thrilled to announce that Tom Linton is joining the Origin engineering team full-time.
Prior to joining Origin, Tom spent 8 years as the sole founder of a startup focused on providing search engine analytics to users. During this period he also freelanced on other projects and completed two Masters degrees in Distributed Systems at the Technical University of Berlin and KTH in Stockholm.
Hanging out with Tom in our San Francisco office
Outside of work, Tom likes spending time with his family and exploring his home country of New Zealand. He enjoys snowboarding, trying to surf, and hiking with his two dogs. Tom travels a lot, and particularly enjoys spending time in Mexico where he has family. He speaks Spanish and excels at eating tacos!
Tom on a recent visit to San Francisco
Tom is a great example of a top engineer that we discovered through Origin’s unique hiring process. Back in July of this year, Tom started contributing to our platform by submitting a few pull requests. As a warm-up, Tom refactored our phone attestation service. Then he tackled the bigger challenge of implementing a reliable and easy to use local development environment for the entire team. Again, Tom quickly delivered a solution that we call “Origin in a box” — a set of containers that developers can use to get a working development environment for the Origin codebase in a matter of minutes.
Tom’s work clearly demonstrated several traits that we highly value in Origin’s engineering team: high-quality code, good unit test coverage, attention to detail, moving fast, and a “can-do” and always ready to help others attitude. Given the scope and strong execution on these projects, we invited Tom to be a part of Origin’s “extended engineering team” as a contractor.
In mid-August, while the whole team was preparing for our Mainnet launch, Tom took on the ambitious challenge to completely redesign our production environment. Our backend platform used to run on an eclectic set of AWS dedicated servers and Heroku deployments. Our IPFS and messaging clusters were on AWS, but our attestation and indexing servers were on Heroku. Meanwhile, we needed to add additional servers before the launch for our Discovery service and Testnet token faucet. We didn’t have any automation for deploying code and also lacked monitoring of the health of the various services that were running. Tom quickly came up with a clean design proposal to move our entire stack to use containers orchestrated with Kubernetes. There was some apprehension from the team on moving to a completely new system so close to our launch target — but Tom alleviated all of our concerns by whipping up a quick prototype and systematically walking us through the various aspects of it.
Again, Tom excelled and implemented a production environment in record time, giving us strong foundations for the future growth of the Origin platform. Thanks to Tom, we now have:
Tiered deployments: We have 3 tiers: dev, staging, production. Our code graduates from dev to staging. Once it is ready to ship, the code gets pushed to our user-facing production environment.
Flexible configurations: We can easily add new services, then configure and deploy them. We used this capability to launch the Origin faucet and Discovery servers.
Monitoring and alerting: While we currently only have basic capabilities in this area, we plan on beefing this up by integrating with Prometheus. In addition to standard system level statistics monitoring (CPU, disk, network, etc), we want to add fine-grained application level statistics. This will allow us to detect and alert on anomalies that may occur in any service on our platform.
So here we are, a couple weeks after our Mainnet launch. Our production environment has been running smoothly, and we are looking forward to the next set of improvements: continuous integration and daily automated deployments, monitoring and alerting, and self-serve tools. But one thing is clear: we’ve all been incredibly impressed with Tom’s work. It was an easy and natural decision to extend him an offer to join our engineering team full-time.
Tom is our first full-time engineer in the southern hemisphere and this illustrates how we are quickly becoming a truly distributed engineering team with engineers in Europe, New York, Boulder, San Francisco, and now New Zealand.
On behalf of the entire Origin team, I would like to extend a warm welcome to Tom!
Learn more about Origin:
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.
Today I’m ecstatic to announce that another world-class engineer, Franck Chastagnol, has joined Origin Protocol. Franck started programming at the age of 8 with an Amstrad CPC 664. He and I have known each other since he was the engineering lead on my very first successful product launch at YouTube. Together we built Claim Your Content, YouTube’s earliest content detection, licensing, and monetization product. This was an integral launch when YouTube was still a young 35-person startup figuring out how to effectively partner with companies like Universal Music Group and the BBC. Our work was pivotal in establishing a sustainable business model when it wasn’t yet obvious that YouTube would be a profitable business that could work effectively with content partners all across the world.
Franck and I at the YouTube office in 2006
I’ve spent close to a decade figuring out how to work with Franck again, and today we finally have the right opportunity and timing to partner up again with Origin.
Franck has had a successful career leading engineering teams at numerous high-profile startups that have since grown into some of the largest tech companies in the world. Coincidentally, this will be the sixth company that Franck and Cuong (former head of NYC engineering at Dropbox) have worked at together (Inktomi, Paypal, YouTube, Google, Dropbox, and now Origin). Founding Paypal engineer and first employee at YouTube Yu Pan has also had a long, proven working relationship with Franck across numerous companies.
Franck has had extensive experience building highly scalable, distributed systems across payments, video streaming, search, and many other technologies. At Origin, his initial focus area will be building a low-latency, responsive, and reliable search and indexing system for all the smart contract data that Origin stores across the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS.
In his spare time, Franck enjoys playing football (not the American type) and spending time with his family. At Origin, he is now the best soccer player (sorry Josh) and also the most fluent in French. Franck loves the outdoors, and once climbed both Kilimanjaro and Mt. Whitney in the same week.
Franck hiking in New Zealand
Franck grew up in a rural area of France, in a village with less than 10 houses and more cows than people. He’s also skilled at the quirky art of mushroom hunting (specifically chanterelle and porcini mushrooms). Please extend a warm welcome to the talented and multi-faceted Franck as we continue to build out the Origin engineering team.
Learn more about Origin:
Buy Origin Tokens (OGN): binance.com
Learn more on our website: originprotocol.com
This article was originally written on Medium in 2018. Information below may be outdated.
How did a commercial real estate broker in Norman, Oklahoma become an integral part of a cutting-edge blockchain team? In short, it’s about passion, skill, and community. Today we are happy to announce that Micah Alcorn is the newest member of Origin Protocol.
As an open source project, Origin Protocol has always taken a unique approach of hiring from within our community. Instead of the traditional approach of candidates submitted a resume, taking a coding test, and then an hour of answering questions in a conference room, we get to interact on real issues in real time. Origin being an open source software project means people “apply” to work on Origin by joining our Discord, checking out or Github, and working on open issues and submitting pull requests. This allows for a diverse group of people all over the world (many of whom may not have the typical software engineering resume) to start working with Origin. This diversity of viewpoints and contribution is incredibly important to us and we are engineering our protocols and platform to be open and permission-less just like our engineering community is.
Micah was one of our very first open source contributors, making his first pull request in January, fixing a particularly nasty CSS issue. From there his contributions just got better and more technical. Soon he moved on to web animations, React, and Javascript. He also learned new libraries with astonishing speed, including Flask, PyBabel Localization, and Web3.
We on the engineering team we were asking, “Who is this Micah guy that is contributing such great code, and such a joy to work with?”
The story begins years ago with Micah looking to improve his real estate firm’s marketing efforts. He built a small website. He amazed his customers with a Google-Earth fly-in. He inadvertently learned Javascript as he added customizations. He started attending a Ruby on Rails Meetup. And before you knew it, he was doing more coding than real estate!
An entrepreneur at heart, it wasn’t long before he teamed up with a cofounder and built WellAttended, a box-office management platform for independent theaters and arts organizations. This led him in 2014 to attend Boulder Startup Week where he met Andrew Hyde. Since then, Micah has attended Startup Week every year.
Micah on a hike in Boulder with his cofounder in 2014
So when Andrew joined Origin Protocol in December, Micah took notice and began to follow our progress on Github. Soon he was making his first pull requests, and the journey began.
Micah has become an indispensable part of the Origin team and we are happy to make this official. Those of you who have attended our weekly open engineering calls will recognize Micah as the guy who keeps us all in order and has his finger on the pulse of our many repos, pull requests, and issues. He’s also an integral part of the product team, working out UI/UX issues with our cofounder Matt Liu and our designer Aure Gimon.
If you are also passionate about what we are building at Origin and want to work alongside some amazing coworkers, please reach out. We’re looking forward to your first pull request!
Learn more about Origin:
Origin Protocol is building an open-source platform that enables the creation of peer-to-peer, decentralized marketplaces. The company’s open-source protocols for user identity, reputation, listings, dispute management, and more allow buyers and sellers to meet, communicate, and transact on the blockchain. Origin’s goals are to reduce transaction fees, promote free and transparent commerce, and redistribute value from rent-seeking middlemen to individual buyers and sellers.
Everyday, everyone on our team focuses on our audacious guiding question, “can we build open-source protocols and systems that will one day disrupt dozens or even hundreds of multi-million and even multi-billion dollar marketplace businesses?”
To measure our progress on long-term goals, we track multiple roadmaps, recognizing that our path to achieving our goals will require many iterative steps over a long period of time.
1. On the product and technology side, we’ve made great progress expanding our engineering team, with over 40 contributors to our 100% open-source codebase. We’ve released our alpha on the Rinkeby and Ropsten testnets and are extremely excited to launch v2 of our demo in the coming weeks that will showcase new features like identity management, user profiles, complex transactions of different types of goods and services, and reviews/ratings.
Identity is a particularly important component of the decentralized marketplaces that we’re enabling, and we’re proud of the ground-breaking work we’ve been doing in this area. We recently announced our support of ERC 725 and open-sourced our identity playground as the first known working implementation of the ERC 725 standard.
2. On the community front, we are humbled everyday to see the support that we have received from users all over the world. Our Telegram group is over 22,000 members strong and we have lively discussions with our extended team every day as we do our work in public in Discord. We have amazingly strong presences in Asia, Europe, Australia, and even South America and Africa. We’re still waiting for someone to visit us with a satellite modem from Antarctica!
Our website has been translated to 17 different languages all by volunteers that want to help us further our mission. We’re eager to further step up our community engagement in the coming months as we get closer to platform launch. To this end, we will be hosting more community meetups, running hackathons, and providing more video interviews, AMAs, and livestreams to show the progress we’re making as a team. We want to give our community many more opportunities to get involved. We wouldn’t be able to achieve what we have without your ongoing support. Thank you.
3. On the developer community side, over 45 marketplace partners have signed commitments to build on Origin’s platform using Origin.js and our associated smart contracts. We’re thrilled to be working with some of the top teams in blockchain like Canya and Spin (Pin Protocol), as well as existing thriving marketplaces like ServisHero in Malaysia and Kozaza that are moving their businesses to the blockchain.
4. On the business roadmap, today we are announcing the completion of our Strategic Sale round of fundraising. This is just the first of several additional business milestones that are planned with the goal of broadening the base of Origin users and token holders leading up to a successful platform launch.
Tackling the many technological, user and partnership acquisition, and operational challenges within the sharing economy is no small feat and requires a significant amount of capital. Just as importantly, we need to form strong strategic partnerships and relationships worldwide if we are to continue spreading the Origin mission and software platform to all corners of the world.
To capitalize our project and broaden our global presence, Origin has raised an additional $28.4M Strategic Sale round from strategic partners around the world. Even though the participating investors were people we already knew through our personal networks, we had one-on-one conversations with each investor to ensure they were committed to delivering additional value beyond their capital contributions. The specific commitments vary investor by investor, but include assisting on high-level technical architecture and token design, sourcing international partnership opportunities, recruiting engineering, product management, product design, and operations talent, engaging with local press outlets, and setting up regional meet ups, conferences, and other events.
Among traditional Silicon Valley investors, we are excited to announce the participation of:
In addition to leading cryptocurrency VC and hedge fund Pantera Capital (that led our $3M Advisor round in 2017), we also welcome top investment funds from all around the world:
Finally, we are also grateful to be supported by the founders and companies of other top projects tackling some of the most challenging technology problems in blockchain. Our alliances with them will further speed up the development of features integral to the Origin platform.
The new capital will be used to continue to build out our world-class engineering, product, and business teams as we gear up for a full platform deployment. We’re also allocating capital to support our developer partners that are building on Origin and to find creative ways to give back to the community (stay tuned!).
Of note, in order to stay fully compliant with all US and international regulations, our Strategic Sale was unfortunately limited to accredited investors due to the fact that our platform is still under heavy development. We further vetted our investors to ensure they were able to provide deep commitments that they would be able to further our efforts in very meaningful ways.
We recognize that this has, in the short-term, left out thousands of our supporters that have been rooting for us and contributing to our community in the last few months. Please know that engaging our community and coming up with legal and compliant solutions to create a democratized sharing economy platform are top of mind for the founders and every employee at the company.
While we cannot announce any formal details of what we are working on just yet, we can tell you that we have multiple projects currently in play that are focused on giving the broader community an ability to participate in our platform in a meaningful way. More details will be shared in the coming weeks and months as our platform approaches a Mainnet launch.
Please join me in welcoming the newest members to the Origin family (with many many more to come), and congratulating our team on all the hard work it took to reach this important business milestone.
There’s much more to come!
Matt and Josh, founders of Origin
Learn more about Origin:
Here are 4 reasons why I believe decentralized marketplaces are coming and will be here far faster than most people realize.
Throughout history middlemen have suffered a common fate. Markets like to be efficient and middlemen get replaced with more efficient alternatives, whether that is travel agents being replaced by Kayak and Expedia or expensive financial advisors being replaced by Wealthfront. The blockchain gives us a chance to cut out those rent-seeking middlemen, with revolutionary new business models that allow fees to go to ~zero.
The blockchain is not owned or controlled by any central entity. There’s no single point of failure. This lack of centralization gives us censorship resistance — not only from governments that like to ban certain types of marketplaces, but also from centralized marketplaces which like to pick and choose who is welcome to use their platforms. Look at Uber and Airbnb as examples. Both companies have been banned or heavily regulated in cities all around the world. Likewise, those companies have a history of banning certain individuals for life from ever using their marketplaces.
Decentralized marketplaces allow us to redistribute value to the people who actually contribute the most value in the network. Uber and Airbnb wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the first 100 drivers or hosts, but what did those drivers or hosts get in exchange? Meanwhile, the early employees, investors and founders get filthy rich. New token economics give us a “better than free” business model that incentivizes people to use a platform that rewards early participants in the network.
Blockchain powered marketplaces are instantly global. This is a non-trivial advantage over anyone who attempts to create a centralized marketplace and has to wade through the local laws and banking regulations for each and every jurisdiction in the world where they wish to operate.
We talk in more depth about these four arguments for decentralizing the sharing economy in the Origin Protocol product brief. I hope you’ll check it out.
Sign up for our email list and join us on Telegram to follow our progress as we work to build the sharing economy without intermediaries.
Learn more about Origin:
