Tell us a bit about yourself. (background, work experience, intro to KASPA,etc)
I am a fresh M.Sc. in computer sciences with a focus in cryptography. I’ve known Shai from academy and first heard about Kaspa through him, but took my time in getting in.
What drew you to work on Kaspa technology?
I used to look down on the crypto industry, for the same reasons many do. In university I did glance at cryptocurrencies from an academic perspective, but it only strengthened my view that it all sits on shaky foundations—and having to wait 1 hour to be sure a transaction won’t be reversed didn’t make an impression on me as a real competitor to fiat. When I heard of Kaspa,I was skeptical for these reasons, but followed from a distance. I mostly became impressed with the academic approach to what I saw as a “wing it” type of industry. And yeah, I loved seeing the math I learned in academy, being applied to real world use cases, that people truly care about.
What has been your key role in the Kaspa community?
My main focus currently is on R&D of the Kaspa smart contracts infrastructure. That is, enabling based rollups/daos/meta SC (pick how you want to think of these) to deploy on top of Kaspa, relying on Kaspa’s security and decentralization for sequencing their transactions, while keeping their interpretation of the transaction anchored in Kaspa via zk proofs of the execution of these transactions by order. I am currently working a lot on how interoperability should look between these many “L2”, to prevent the dreaded fragmentation problem.
You received a research/dev grant from KEF. Can you explain what that was, why you applied, what does it entail? Are you focused on Kaspa core network, or is it generalized work that any development team could implement?
After a long time spent on discord, I knew I had a good grasp of the theory, and made a leap of faith. I started learning rust. When I finished going through the rust book, I got in touch with Michael and Yonatan and asked how I can help Kaspa. With their guidance, I simultaneously started coding (KIP6) and researching (oracles at the time) for Kaspa. After a while, I asked Yonatan if there is a way I could continue what I do while having financial stability. Yonatan suggested KEF could help out with a research grant, and from there I got in touch with Monica and Junny. We all jointly decided Kaspa needs at the moment more manpower on the smart contracts infrastructure design, so that became the focus.
Kaspa is aiming to solve real world problems. Utility and every day use adoption is the goal. Verses personal wealth making and get rich schemes, typical to cryptoland themes for 15 years.Tell us how your work will help this mission.
“Complex” finance at times looks boring, but it had a role in our modern world achieving what it has. At the moment, these complex functionalities are usually limited to brokers and corporations. The common folk are excluded from this game. A case could be made that it is exactly because we are so unfamiliar with that world, that we usually find it boring.
Defi thus far has not really managed to be simultaneously decentralized and functional at scale. Kaspa, unhindered by the common problems of throughput limitation and slow confirmations, could be the first to democratize complex financing.
What are you most looking forward to as it relates to Kaspa global adoption mission. Where do you see groups/projects like Kii and KEF helping in this?
I hope to see more and more foundations step in to help Kaspa achieve its calling. Supporting devs is important and vital, but I guess another thing I’d like to see is more encouragement for people and corporations to use and accept Kaspa. Kaspa is very convenient and can be an amazing pay on the spot method. I work on SC, but I first and foremost think of Kaspa as a payment method. Time will tell.
Whats is your take on the Kaspa community, culture/environment that has been created these past 3.5 years? Any shout outs? 🙂
I mostly hang around in the Kaspa discord. I enjoy seeing the unmediated interface between common folk from all backgrounds and ivory tower academics. It’s something that I don’t think exists in many other fields. It’s fascinating to me to see how people evolve with time and learn more and more of crypto-myself included.
I don’t know for certain, but to an extent, I think this is unique for the Kaspa community, because without over-romanticizing, we are very much more tech oriented, and on good days at least, can even take a well constructed criticism.