Our ecosystem thrives with developers building amazing projects on top of Alephium, delivering a unique experience and providing real utility for users. In the Builders Highlight series, they share more about their projects, thoughts, and insights on why building on Alephium. You can find Sezame Wallet, Alphpaca NFTs, Ayin, No Trust, Verify, Deadrare, What the Duck, Alphpad, NGU, Mobula, Amolyus, and Fugashu episodes here!
Today, we welcome LinxLabs! They built a beautiful wallet and, with their OTC platform, were one of our hackathon winners.
Here, they share some insights into how they got into crypto, how they started building their products, and their plans for the future!
Hi! Please tell us a bit about yourself & your co-workers. Who are you? Where are you? (if you want!) What do you do? (As a job, as a hobby, or in general!)
We are the Linx Labs team run by Radu Ciobanu, Floor de Best and Raul Canta.
About Floor: Lifelong entrepreneur from the Netherlands, married, proud dad of 2 sons and living in Spain. Full stack developer in the Linx Labs team and is into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Tinkering as a hobby.
About Radu: I’m an engineer with a knack for figuring out how stuff ticks. Whether it’s a machine or a concept, I’m always curious to dig into the details. I like to win, whether I’m battling it out in the startup world or on the tennis court. But beyond the competition, I find real satisfaction in lending a hand to others. Helping people out just feels right, and it’s what drives me the most.
About Raul: I am a UI/UX engineer who loves simplifying tricky problems. Whether designing interfaces or solving user experience issues, I thrive on finding straightforward solutions. When I’m not at my desk, you’ll likely find me tearing up mountain bike trails. When I need a break from screens, I enjoy the challenge of lock-picking as a hobby.
Can you tell us a bit about your journey in tech/crypto?
Floor: I have been following Bitcoin since its inception and thought, on every peak, ‘I got to get into this’, but I never really got into it until 2016/2017. As I have been tinkering with hardware and software since a very young age, I decided in 2021 that I wanted to build something crypto-related. This was the start of what is now Linx Wallet.
Radu: I watched from the sidelines for a while until I joined the party back in 2017. I co-founded an analytics crypto startup in 2018. For the next couple of years, I spent most of my time working on arbitrage and various MEV strategies when DeFi was just getting started. In early 2021, I met Floor and started building what today is Linx Labs.
Raul: My journey into the crypto world started with a DIY mining rig project alongside a buddy of mine. However soon after I returned to my love for design. It wasn’t until I joined the Linx Labs team that my passion for crypto reignited, and I finally got to launch my first crypto project.
How did you find out about Alephium? What did you find here that you didn’t find elsewhere?
Last year, someone suggested we look into Alephium as an investment, and we were immediately impressed by the state of development and user experience on the blockchain, besides the amazing technical capabilities. Since we have experience with sharded blockchains, we immediately saw opportunities to bring the Alephium ecosystem to the next level.
You’ve been one of the big winners of the hackathon. How was your experience hacking in there? How’s the learning curve to get going? What took the most time to grasp?
This was our first hackathon participation, so we can’t really compare, but overall, it was a great experience. When we started, we had no experience yet with Ralph and smart contracts on Alephium, but within a couple of days, we had the first version of our contracts running on devnet.
The documentation was good, but what helped the most was some example contracts from other projects like alephium-dex and alephium-nft-marketplace and the direct technical support from the team. Even though we didn’t really encounter anything that we couldn’t grasp, it took a bit to fully understand the limitations between shards and how that influences the smart contracts/frontend.
Tell us a little bit about Linx Labs’s history! What’s the Linx Wallet & Linx OTC origin story?
Floor and Radu met in 2021 in a sharded PoW project, which they both invested in, and both realized there was a big problem with the user experience in dealing with multiple chains/shards on a blockchain. We talked for a couple of months about it, and in 2022, we decided we were going to build something to improve this. The initial project was an NFT Marketplace, but after a while, they realized the current wallets weren’t able to deal with the marketplace, and their user experience was terrible. Floor already started in 2021 with building a wallet, and in 2022, it was decided to build a wallet first with a ‘chainless / shardless’ experience, which we called Linx Wallet.
In September 2022, Raul joined to take care of the design. When we decided to build on Alephium, we wanted to start with something ‘small’ that could be built relatively quickly but would take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Alephium blockchain. Having atomic swap capabilities, the natural conclusion was an application for true permissionless ‘Over the Counter’ trades, LinxOTC.
Looking at your past projects, you have a thing for abstracting complexity. It’s evident, whether it’s sharding abstraction, integrating wallet and dex aggregator, or offering a simple, efficient UX that hides the tech's complications. Can you tell us where that comes from?
We believe an amazing user experience can only exist if you make it as simple as possible. In our mind, the ultimate goal of any application is that a (crypto) user should be able to use it without any prior knowledge. This means that in crypto, you have to abstract away a lot of complexities, especially on a sharded blockchain.
It’s rare to see technical teams with such UX chops, and that has been abundantly clear in the hackathon itself and in your communication. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
When Radu and Floor started building, they immediately decided that the design part / flow and the overall user experience had to come from a top-level designer, preferably without any crypto experience. This was Raul, and he is the basis of every design. In the design process, we thoroughly go through every technical step and try to simplify it for the user as much as possible.
When it comes to communication: we are community members, crypto investors, we know exactly what we want to see from other projects in communications and we try to apply that to our communication as well. We are constantly stepping back into ‘what would a user want’ and trying to be as open as possible as an organization and stay close to our users and community.
How do you see the future of the Linx ecosystem? What’s on your roadmap? What would be the Linx moonshot?
Crypto has a long way to go before it is actually usable for the average Joe who just started in crypto. In an ideal world, users should be able to simply deal with every kind of DeFi from a single, user-friendly application. Dealing with bridges, DEXs, multi-chains, etc., can be very daunting. Linx is going to play a big role in significantly improving the user experience in dealing with all of crypto; that’s the moonshot.
What advice would you give to someone looking to build on Alephium, based on your experience?
Start. Go through the documentation, talk with someone from the team and just start building.
Where can we stay in touch with your project & with you? Is it possible to contribute?
You can follow us on X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/linx_labs
Or come chat in Discord or Telegram:
Discord 🔗 https://discord.com/invite/6kcuU7Tt22
Telegram 🔗 https://t.me/linx_wallet_chat
Download Linx Wallet
IOS 🔗 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/thinedgelabs-linx-wallet/id6450412379
Android 🔗 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thinedgelabs.linx_wallet
Thank you, LinxLabs, for your answers!
Disclaimer: While Alephium is happy to support a growing developer community, it would like to clarify that it does not endorse, audit, or review any software presented in this series and encourages all users to make informed decisions and take personal responsibility for their actions.
Have you built something or have a nice idea and want to request a grant or reward? You can access the Alephium Community Grants & Reward Program page for more info!
