Building Blocks: New Beginnings at AssetBlock
Throughout my career, I’ve always been driven by design. The products and services we love are the kinds of experiences that best cater to our lifestyle in the most intuitive and unexpectedly human ways. From my beginnings as a user experience designer to engineering roles at CarGurus, Hubspot, and most recently PathAI, I’ve always been guided by a desire to make the complicated more accessible and to work towards a greater good through solid human-oriented design. Designing for people keeps us honest. It keeps us connected to one another. Most importantly, it keeps us mindful of where the line between profit and our users should be.
At some point, we’ve all come into contact with the extensive media coverage surrounding blockchain tech, and by extension, cryptocurrency. Many, myself included, felt that cryptocurrency was a money grab or complicated pyramid scheme appealing to only the most tech-savvy early adopters. It seemed like everyone was talking about using the blockchain to get rich quick, as long as you didn’t mind running up your electric bill and heating your home with a stack of GPUs mining for Bitcoin. It was hard to identify, but there always seemed to be a bit of a revolutionary undertone behind it all — the potential for a new beginning rising up through all the noise.
After an introduction to the team at AssetBlock this past fall, I quickly realized that the blockchain is, in essence, a revolutionary way to solve one of the greatest problems we face today in our increasingly-connected world: how do we provide fair and equitable access to information while also maintaining control of our own sensitive data?
It feels like a month hasn’t gone by where we haven’t heard at least one story of a corporation being irresponsible with our personal information, selling it to the highest bidder or simply not securing it properly. Why aren’t these corporations respecting our data as an extension of our trust and our basic human right to privacy?
Taking control of our own information is only the start of what blockchain technology can do. There are millions of opportunities out there, chances to open new doors for a greater number of people previously locked out of financial options due to various geographic, financial or personal barriers. It quickly became apparent to me that the blockchain has a real potential for solving many of these problems, built right into its core design tenets of transparency, decentralization, and accountability.
Given this potential, I was incredibly excited to join AssetBlock and be a part of a team developing a platform to democratize access to investments that for decades have only been available to a select group of people. In doing so, we give investors a chance to experience both larger returns and to gain unprecedented transparency into their investment’s performance. Finding the best investment opportunities doesn’t have to be complicated, and they certainly shouldn’t be hidden behind obscure obstacles. At AssetBlock, we’re going to put the human back into investing.
To accomplish this, we’re building a diverse and passionate team of problem solvers, constant learners, and challengers of the status quo. With the last count being that there are around 30 million developers globally compared to about 200,000 working on blockchain applications, there is no better time to bring your unique talents to the blockchain space. I, for one, hope to bring my background in design and engineering to bear by working on ways to make blockchain adoption easier for those who are less technical and those who have been intimidated or worried about the uncertainty that has characterized the space thus far. Technology doesn’t have to be intimidating to provide value, and as we all know, broad adoption and transformative change almost always go hand-in-hand.
As more problem solvers turn their attention towards blockchain applications, there continue to be unique opportunities to build core tools, standards, and best practices. We all have the chance to help guide the future of where blockchain development goes next, with unprecedented freedom to experiment and collaborate with some of the most welcoming and brilliant minds I’ve had the privilege to learn from in my career.
Any experience, regardless of how much you know about the blockchain, is not only worthwhile, but necessary. Your unique talents will add to the greater whole as it grows into what we believe will be the next revolution in the way we build applications and share data across the world.
Are you interested in lending your talents to a new beginning too? We’re hiring!
You can check out our openings here.
Originally published at https://medium.com on May 8, 2019.
