Steering Grove into the Future
Today, I am humbled and honored to take over Grove as CEO.
When I met Mike on Twitter nearly 10 years ago, never in my wildest dreams did I think that that chance encounter would take me on this insane journey. From first hearing about the ideas of Pocket Network in 2017, to becoming an early advisor and Pocket DAO member, to joining the team overseeing engineering in the winter of 2021–2022, to becoming COO, and now taking on the mantle of CEO. It’s been an absolutely crazy ride, full of many unexpected twists and turns that come from working in a startup within the blockchain/crypto/web3 space over the last few years.
Though the Pocket Network Inc. entity has been around for nearly 7 years, we truly began hitting our stride when we relaunched our core product, the Portal, and simultaneously rebranded and re-founded the company in the summer of 2023 as Grove Redefines Our Very Existence Inc. — a recursive acronym on Grove. Mike laid out our mission back then and I aim to carry the torch to see it through.
Explicitly, our goals are:
- Launch Shannon in early 2025, the next generation upgrade to the most useful blockchain™, Pocket Network, enabling and incentivizing permissionless demand on this decentralized supply network.
- Launch an open source version of our Path API and Toolkit Harness (a.k.a. PATH — another recursive acronym) by year’s end, which is the white-labeled version of Grove’s Portal that has processed nearly a trillion blockchain transactions on Pocket Network.
- Unlock demand on Pocket Network via PATH by scaling it to support verticals beyond blockchain RPC (e.g., AI inferencing, Storage protocols, Decentralized social protocols, etc.)
Our CTO, Daniel Olshansky, recently simplified the above goals into the following one liner mission statement: Enable gateways by streamlining access to a decentralized supply network.
We are going to make sure Pocket Network outlasts us all, and the whole team at Grove, led by our newly minted Chief Information Officer, Fred Teumer, Daniel Olshansky, and myself will make sure that happens.
Ultimately, all paths lead to Grove 🌿
