Meet the Founders
Colin Steil — Cartesi COO
We have welcomed thousands of new members into the Cartesi community since the project started in 2018 and the now flourishing Cartesi ecosystem is also host to ambassadors from around the globe. CTSI Reserve Mining and our PoS System is as equally busy with its organic growth, having seen adoption from over 173 active nodes and more than 50,000,000 CTSI now staked.
One of the driving forces behind the growth of Cartesi is the project’s Chief Operating Officer, Colin Steil, and in this article, we’ll be exploring how he started in the blockchain space as well as what he thinks the future holds for both Cartesi and blockchain as a whole.
Colin is Co-Founder and COO of Cartesi and, as a previous venture capitalist and start-up founder, he brings deep expertise in execution, community building and business operations to the project. Remembering the early days of Bitmex and after discovering blockchain through the investment portfolio of a previous venture capital firm, Colin realised the potential of the technology and began networking within the space.
With degrees in Commerce, International Business and Finance from the University of Alberta, Colin is well-versed in making things happen and previously worked as an Investment and Global Partnerships Manager for SOSV’s Chinaccelerator and MOX, a VC firm with global accelerator arms, 1000+ portfolio companies, and 800+ million in assets under management.
As Cartesi COO, Colin is constantly working to ensure the smooth operations of Cartesi, expanding the partnership network of the platform, as well as building upon the already thriving social, staking and ambassador communities.
What made you get into blockchain?
I originally discovered blockchain in early 2017 while I was working at one of the most active early-stage venture capital firms — SOSV. SOSV has over $800 million US in assets under management and runs multiple accelerators all around the globe that focus on different verticals. I was an investment and global partnerships manager for both their China arm — Chinaccelerator, and the Taiwan arm — Mobile Only Accelerator, both of which focus on internet and app startups.
During my time at SOSV, I onboarded and worked with a multitude of early companies that were early exchanges (such as Bitmex), as well as various projects who were researching and integrating blockchain into their products. Once I started learning more about the technology I immediately fell in love, initially for the impact it will have on finance.
From this point on, I got hooked on researching different projects, protocols, reading whitepapers and learning everything that I could. It was then that I met my co-founder, Erick de Moura, which led to the beginning of Cartesi, where I was introduced to the other co-founders, Augusto Teixeira and Diego Nehab, who were already thinking about the initial idea behind the project.
“From here, everything is history and now I am fully committed and passionate about making blockchain a reality. This is a big part of why I am so excited about what we are building at Cartesi, which will allow the industry to see real world applications and mainstream adoption.”
What do you see as the industry’s biggest bottleneck to mainstream adoption currently?
Currently I see a number of factors that are influencing mainstream adoption:
- Limited tooling, software, and limitations of underlying blockchains to create apps similar to what we see in the centralized world.
- A “walled garden” that exists in blockchains that are active. We have not yet seen large businesses moving their operations to DApps. We are slowly seeing interest and the beginnings of this, but there is a big barrier for adoption yet.
- Security — the industry as a whole is still early and there has been a lot of incidents that resulted in the loss of funds for certain people experimenting on new DeFi DApps or other products. There are still risks present and this scares newcomers when they see headlines related to this. However, awareness and processes will come as a result of the ecosystem maturing.
- Education — for mainstream adoption, the user experience needs to be seamless and as close as possible to the use of centralized applications.
How do you see Cartesi helping to address these issues in order to build the bridge between mainstream and blockchain?
What we are building at Cartesi has the potential to mitigate a large portion of these issues that I mentioned above. Our unfair advantage at Cartesi is that we allow developers to code their smart contracts and DApps directly with mainstream software components and Linux OS resources — this has never been possible before and only by re-inventing the wheel around software that has been evolving over the last 30 years.
We see this as a mandatory step the industry will have to take in order to become mature and see real-world applications being built on top of blockchains. This will also allow DApps to become much more expressive, and provide a user experience that is seamless.
All of this will result in a large influx of traditional developers and users coming into the ecosystem, leading to mainstream adoption.
What do you see the next 5 years in smart contract development looking like for Cartesi?
The vision of what we are building at Cartesi is to make the development and usability of DApps as close as possible to their centralized counterparts.
In the next 5 years, we envision allowing any developer to be able to create very complex DApps and deploy them on any relevant blockchain platform that they wish — all without having to know about the idiosyncrasies of blockchains themselves.
“With the implementation of optimistic rollups with the Cartesi Machine, alongside Noether (out high performance data availability side-chain), our scalability stack will be close to seeing this as a reality.”
Cartesi will truly bring mainstream adoption to blockchain.
What has been the most memorable moment for you working in the space in the last 5 years?
Cartesi’s progress and milestone achievements through and through! It has been a wild journey and we are more excited than ever before about what is to come, especially in 2021.
Apart from this, the DeFi boom was a very exciting moment for me, and a monumental turn for the industry; especially Ethereum. As what first got me excited about blockchain was the fact that DeFi would have a revolutionary impact on how financial products operate, the innovative products, speed of new innovations, and the amount of users and adoption in such a short amount of time which was unprecedented and really exciting for me.
We can’t wait to see what other real-world financial products we’ll be able to bring to the space with Cartesi.
Name another project you think could help shape the future of blockchain besides Cartesi?
There’s a ton of amazing projects in the space that are working towards the vision of making blockchain become a reality, and it’s almost impossible for me to pick just one.
This brings me back to some of the DeFi projects I follow which have the potential to shape blockchain immediately. Synthetix is amazing, with its vision of bringing real-world assets to the blockchain, one of the keys to gaining mainstream attention. Synthetix is also a leader in the space, as they are one of the first to implement a layer-2 solution on Mainnet, showing us that it’s time for layer-2 solutions to shine!
We are a big fan of these technologies and are constantly looking for quality projects that are on the same page as us to partner with. If you’re building an innovative solution in the space and are interested in learning more about Cartesi, please reach out, we’d love to chat!
Cartesi’s Ecosystem Links:
Website: https://cartesi.io
Explorer: https://explorer.cartesi.io
Discord (Development Community): https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject
Telegram: https://t.me/cartesiproject
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/cartesiannouncements
GitHub: https://github.com/cartesi
