BEN Spotlight: Steve Flanagan
- When did you first hear about blockchain? What got you excited about it?
I first heard about blockchain when news broke of Silk Road being shut down. I was 15 or so at the time, and I remember coming across an Ars Technica article about the investigation when I was a freshman in high school (I remember the year because I know I used to waste time in biology class reading about it). I was naïve at the time and had a very disapproving impression of Bitcoin from the news — I saw it solely as a tool for crime and didn’t understand how technology and morality related to one another. At the same time, though, I was very interested in cryptography — I have been since I was a child creating cyphers for fun. This drove me to learn more about how Bitcoin worked and what a cryptographically-assured public ledger meant. When I understood the technology, I began to understand what was useful about it, and how to discern the morality of a tool from the morality of its users.
I first got truly excited about blockchain when I encountered NuBits, an early attempt at a decentralised stablecoin. Nu’s stability mechanism, which depended on assets that incentivised everyone to behave in a way that achieved stability, was beautiful to me — but more importantly, seeing this kind of incentive alignment in action opened my eyes to how humanity could be coordinated together through blockchain-enforced agreements. This insight, combined with a community that was so helpful & encouraging to me when I was learning to contribute, drove me to become a builder and dreamer.
2. How did you get involved with BEN?
I got involved with BEN in May 2018, about a year after starting Northeastern’s blockchain club. I believe our club first engaged with BEN in order to collaborate on programming for PillarVC’s Boston Blockchain Week!
3. What projects are you working on now?
I am currently CEO at Bountium, where we redefine trust in business. We have built a software platform that digitises & automates Trade Letter of Credit processes. The long-term goal is to replace these Letters of Credit with smart contracts to enable peer-to-peer, global, uncensorable commerce.
Our previous projects included the first bounty-based supply ordering tools, through which a business can issue a smart contract bounty for goods & services it needs to operate. We then created revenue-generating DAOs, extending the DAO smart contract to allow a user to release products, receive orders, and programmatically issue bounties to fulfill orders. The result was a fully autonomous, decentralisable business. We build the dApps to operate these and released our alpha in late August 2019. We pivoted to focus on this Letter of Credit market last fall, and released our alpha in April.
4. What’s next for you?
The next goal is to lock down customer number one at Bountium! We’re seeking tech-friendly banks and businesses that frequently work across borders. We want to give them fast, automatable, painless processes to make international business easier than ever.
Twitter: @flevestanagan
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