tl;dr: 2018 was an exciting year for brainbot: We are working on awesome projects in the blockchain space, we’ve had many great additions to the team, and: We are still hiring!
Memorable Events from 2018
2018 started off with a lot of “physical movement”: The Berlin team moved into the FULL NODE Co-Working space, while the Mainz team moved into a new office in Mainz.
We sponsored and mentored at ETHBerlin hackathon. We attended the Web3 summit and Jannik presented a pragmatic approach for Building Minimum Viable PoS Sidechains based on Aura.
Heiko discussed Ethereum’s scalability with Vitalik, Karl, Liam and Hsiao-Wei in a panel at the TechCrunch Ethereum meetup in Zug.
Some of the brainbots took part in the Status #cryptolife Hackathon and won the first prizes for “Universal Login” and “Social Track”!
DevconIV took place in Prague and Jannik talked about P2P Networking in Ethereum 2.0, while the Raiden team gave a talk and hosted a packed hands-on workshop explaining how to get started with Raiden and how to use the Raiden API. During the workshop, a network with more than 400 open channels was created by more than 100 participants.
Furthermore, we’ve been stepping up our collaboration in multiple projects with TU Darmstadt, i.e. Professor Sebastian Faust and his team.
And to end the year, we gathered the whole company on Malta to discuss project- and company-specific topics f2f and have a nice time together.
Short Project Updates
Raiden Network
A fair share of brainbot’s employees is currently contributing to the Raiden Network.
The Raiden Network is an off-chain scaling solution for the Ethereum network, enabling near-instant, low-fee and scalable payments.
For Raiden, it’s been a busy year in terms of development, working straight towards the first alpha testing version “Red Eyes” on the Ethereum mainnet. A weekly to bi-weekly snapshot release rhythm was introduced to share the development progress with the community. The second half of the year was dedicated to bug hunting and bug fixing in preparation for the Red Eyes release.
Besides that, the Raiden team has been presenting the development progress and the Raiden Network’s vision at several conferences:
- EthCC in Paris
- Asia meetup tour alongside other cool crypto projects
- Edcon in Toronto
- DappCon in Berlin
- Off the Chain in Berlin
- Devcon in Prague
- AppCoin summit in Lisbon
…and other, smaller events and meetups in Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen, Prague, Barcelona and Singapore.
Trustlines Network
The Trustlines Network has the vision to enable blockchain-based, permissionless, people-empowered currency networks based on IOU systems.
Over the year, the Trustlines Network went through some iterations and transformations on the technical and organizational side. Not all of them are quite ready to be announced, yet, however stay tuned to hear much of them in 2019. We are still extremely excited to be contributing to this project.
We are happy to see the non-profit Trustlines Foundation being established independently from brainbot, which will support research, development, deployment, governance and adoption of complementary currency systems, with a focus on open source protocols designed to be utilized by decentralized p2p currency network designs.
Ethereum 2.0 / Serenity
We are supporting Ethereum by enabling one of our developers, Jannik, to contribute to the Ethereum 2.0 / “Serenity” research team. As part of that team, he worked on:
- p2p research: identification and evaluation of different network protocols for eth2.0
- prototyping: helping implementing early drafts of the sharding/eth2.0 spec
- implementation: working on one of the actual implementations (part of py-evm/Trinity)
We aim to continue this support in 2019.
eth.events
We co-founded the joint venture Anyblock Analytics, which builds eth.events, an open-source Ethereum search engine. Eth.events can be used for indexes, blocks, transactions, logs and human-readable smart contract events from the ethereum mainnet. Read more about its functionalities here.
We wish the founders Peter and Sascha the best of luck with their endeavour!
Meet the Team — New Joiners 2018
We are delighted to announce that more than 15 people started their new job with us in 2018.
Dr. Stefan Teis, former Head of Blockchain at Deutsche Börse, and former member of the governing board at Hyperledger, joined as Managing Director of Brainbot Technologies.
Furthermore, Dr. Johannes Grote joined focusing on company operations and finance. Prior to brainbot, Johannes served as COO at Vicampo, a successful online retailer, which scaled up to 200 people during his tenure, and where he led the company structuring process.
On the technical side, many great minds joined the company. Throughout this year, we welcomed Tobias (@err508), Come (@cducrest), Rakan (@rakanalh), Cosmin (@CosminNechifor), Konstantinos (@kelsos), Thore (@weilbith), Frederik (@luehrsFred), Pepe (@gorela), Karl (@karlb) and Yoichi (@pirapira) to the team! Also, we are happy about Ralf (@schmir) re-joining us!
Additionally, Andreas and Christian joined as project managers and scrum experts. Sarah joined to support the whole team with admin and organizational tasks. Dominik (@Dominik1999) bridges use-case driven project management with actual development.
Last but not least, since August, Franziska Heintel is taking care of communications at brainbot. Prior to brainbot, she was portfolio manager for machine economy and blockchain startups in the VC arm of a German electric utility company.
Overall, the team grew by 45% this year. The project teams have been advancing, distributing responsibilities among more individuals and further professionalizing many of our processes and structures, while keeping our natural startup spirit alive.
And yet still, we have more ideas to bring to life and challenges to tackle, than hands at keyboards.
That’s why we are hiring!
Why should you join us on our mission?
To quote our CEO, Heiko, on this one:
“We are wholehearted blockchain tech enthusiasts with low tolerance for bullshit or drama, we endorse proactivity and taking responsibility, we are committed to open source, open protocols and public chains. Most importantly, we think that work should not only be challenging and come with the right monetary incentives, but also fun and a social thing. This mixture is what we believe makes brainbot a great place to work and grow as a professional, but also as a human being.”
If we got you hooked now and you want to join a fast-growing, global tech leader in the blockchain space, please have a look at our open positions or shoot us an email to career@brainbot.com.
We are not only looking for highly talented developers who are excited about blockchain technology, but also for experts in UX, Graphic/Web Design and DevOps.
So why not become part of this amazing, open ecosystem at the technological frontier?
Talk to you soon,
Team Brainbot
P.S.: This post only covers updates of 2018. To find out more about our company, please also consider to check out the whole letter from our CEO, Heiko, talking about brainbot.
