By: David Packham
I’m going to share a story that inspires me, and hopefully others. It’s a story of more highs than lows. But above all, this story is about unintended consequences and benefits that arise when bringing the creative energy of the EOS community together.
Back in January I met Charles Holtzkampf. Riding a burst of mutual inspiration, we decided to go all-in and work full time to launch a block producer candidacy. EOS42 was born. We had an early vision to build something big and meaningful for the EOS community. It was from that notion that a couple weeks of intensive work had begun, and we developed the initial dream of delivering a token leasing platform near the launch date of the EOS network. Drawing on expertise from people all over the world and the EOS community, led to the Chintai whitepaper that was published in February 2018.
From its inception, Chintai was always designed to be a community driven project. The community based orientation and spirit that conceived Chintai, will continue to infuse the project moving forward. Several BP’s will provide multi-sig security. Additionally, we will hand over governance and overall direction of application development to the global community.
Looking back, I’m amazed by the wealth of talented individuals that came together in January to co-author the Chintai whitepaper. Most of whom would go on to launch their own leading block producers or build amazing things on EOS. For example, Scatter and the Nebulus protocol. Now there are far, far more people in the EOS community — for those reading and wanting to do something on EOS but unsure how, the single best piece of advice I can offer: team up with others, define your vision, and build your own community project.
Chintai had a bumpy start. The model was unconventional but powerful: for a group of Block Producers to sponsor the ongoing development of Chintai, provide all necessary bandwidth/cpu and cover limited post-launch development costs to enable fee-less token leasing — a non-profit community project in the truest sense.
The EOS community rallied around the spirit of Chintai. Soon thereafter, the first talented volunteers started to emerge to join the team. Specifically, Liam Wu and Sean Kang who provided the Chinese, Spanish and Korean whitepaper translations and joined EOS42 as part of our BP candidacy.
April quickly arrived. Besides the branding and beautiful UI vision done by the hard work of Steve Floyd from EOS Tribe, we didn’t have much in terms of meaningful value. Then I remembered a talented coder that I had met on Reddit in r/eos back in November 2017. Beyond talking about my plans to launch a project and build on EOS, our conversation left me with an intuition that he would be great fit for a joint endeavor. Sometimes things are just meant to be — Michael Fletcher was the first key developer to join the team. With some oversight from NS James, he quickly got into building the first iteration of the Chintai smart contract.
Subsequent to the addition of Michael, momentum started to build and Chintai started to take tangible form. Michael provided the recommendation that led to the addition of Phil Hamnett, who took lead on the back end C++ coding. Shortly after we found EOS veteran Andrew Coutts, who amazed us all with the React/front end UI he created. It’s fair to say in my 20yrs working on software development projects, I have never come across such a pro-active, talented and enthusiastic bunch of independents. Claiming I project managed them is to oversell the reality of my limited role. However, post-EOS launch it was an easy decision to invite all three to join EOS42. We’ve developed a strong bond through this amazing process and have a fury of creative momentum that will infuse more exciting projects in the future.
We are now just days away from launching Chintai onto the mainnet. Currently, a version of Chintai is available on the Jungle here: https://jungle.chintai.io
The lesson that genuinely delights me as I reminisce about an idea on a piece of paper in February, that evolved into a highly complex decentralized leasing exchange launching on EOS in September, is a cliche story about the power of community. Cliche aside, it really is true: by aiming high and focusing on building something, Chintai and the EOS42 team organically sprouted from the soil of the EOS community.
I would just like to add a word of thanks for the unwavering support during these long months from the Chintai sponsors. Because of their support, we are able to provide a fee-less leasing model and trust that Chintai will continue to grow as we step back post-launch.
This was the cross community project in development I envisaged, it just happens I recognize talent when I see it and so we hired them all!
Your Chintai Block Producer Sponsors (in order of when they became sponsors), who will provide the community with fee-less token leasing are:
EOS42
EOS New York
EOS Detroit
EOS Cannon
EOS Dublin
EOS Nation
eosDAC
OracleChain
EOSphere
EOS Tribe
EOSYS
EOS42 — Pioneering a Decentralized Future and Securing the EOS Mainnet
EOS42 PROJECTS:
