Interview — Dan Gershony— Chief Technology Officer at Stratis Platform
What is your name, function and role at Stratis?
I am Dan Gershony, CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at Stratis Platform. I smoke cigars.
How did you first learn about Bitcoin and the crypto space?
It was around the end of 2012 that I came upon a very detailed article on the Israeli economy site Calcalist about Bitcoin and its potential to change the monetary system.
The article was analyzing a report made by the ESB about cryptocurrencies. They talked about how this new system could break the banks’ monopoly of money.
I was very intrigued. Naturally, I read the Bitcoin white paper and after that, I was hooked.
Which aspects of Bitcoin and the crypto space made you choose to explore it more?
I am a bit of an anarchist at heart. I have this natural tendency to question the reasons behind decisions made by any authority. I am a strong believer in transparency and equality (sometimes to a fault).
I was not aware of the notion of decentralization when I started to get familiar with Bitcoin, it was this thing that is competition to banks (one has to remember that just a few years before we experienced one of the biggest recessions of our time which were mostly due to the banking system) and competition is always good especially when challenging a monopoly with such strong bearing on our lives, our money.
The concept of decentralization, which is what crypto is all about, is very appealing to me. I strongly believe that gradually over time more parts of our industry and society will become decentralized and I hope that the hard work we are doing at Stratis will help in shaping that future.
Did you work at anything crypto related before you joined Stratis?
I founded coinvault.io, a non-custodial crypto web wallet.
The motivation behind coinvault was to use my skills as a software developer to benefit the space. Bitcoin is complicated to understand and to use for the non tech savvy. My aspiration was to make a service that would help to make it simple and accessible to use Bitcoin.
How did you learn about the Stratis Platform?
I used to go to meetups in London mainly by Coinscrum (they later joined with CryptoCompare) and I heard from one of my contacts about Stratis and that they are building the Bitcoin blockchain in C#. It all sounded very interesting, so I joined Slack (at the time) and started to talk with Chris and Krushang, two weeks later I joined the team.
When I joined Nicolas bootstrapped the fullnode based on NBitcoin and was then busy building the consensus code for Bitcoin. I started to look at the POS algorithm for Stratis. When Nicolas left, I took over the code base.
When did you join Stratis and why?
I joined two months after the ICO (June 2016). Why? Well, building the Bitcoin protocol in C# sounded really cool. I had just finished working on coinvault and had already accumulated quite a lot of knowledge (mainly on wallets) on the Bitcoin protocol. To build a fullnode in C# meant to play with the low levels of the protocol, how could I pass on such a chance is the correct question.
A few months later I convinced Jeremy to join Stratis, it was just the four of us based in London. A very small team with no office yet. We used to have monthly team meetings in Dartford, later we referred to that as team Dartford ;).
How does a typical work day look like for you?
The working environment at Stratis is pretty flexible. Developers have autonomy to work on tasks on their time, more than half the team is located all around the world so we try to find a time that fits all time zones for the daily standup which is often around 11 am UK time.
We use Slack a lot to communicate on technical discussions but try to put summaries and outcomes of those discussions on the public repo on GitHub, this is also so the community can get involved. Working on an open source project is fantastic, it’s great to see new contributors submit code that fixes a bug or improves the code base.
What would you consider as the greatest joys in the things you do for Stratis?
The ability to work on the Bitcoin protocol.
I haven’t worked so hard in any of my previous projects as I have at Stratis. I enjoy every moment of it, it’s pure fun to work on open source public decentralized networks, and a lot of that is thanks to our great community.
What’s the moment that made you most proud so far at Stratis?
When I see other developers understand the protocol and our code base as I do, take ownership of tasks, make improvements, propose changes, write designs and discuss about decentralization. All of this makes me very proud.
I feel we are achieving the goal to get more developers to know and understand blockchain. I hope to see public discussions outside of the Stratis community about developing, testing and deploying smart contracts in C# on the Stratis network.
At the moment what I am really looking forward to is the day the entire network runs on the C# code base.
In your own words what is Stratis?
Stratis is a platform for building decentralized networks based on a blockchain concept built on top of the Bitcoin protocol targeting the MS dotnet space and mainly focused on enterprises.
Do you see any room for improvements in Bitcoin and crypto?
For the first time finance is being disrupted. Fintech is bringing improvements on the old ways but Bitcoin is disrupting them. The crypto space is also full of dreams and empty promises and folks should be careful on how they invest. The ICO wave for example is the opposite of what crypto stands for, sovereignty over your own money. Investors traded their money for useless tokens and a promise they will have value in the future.
I think the next wave will come with more protection for investors, either as regulated ICO (commonly referred to as STO) or self-regulated on-chain ICOs (like the concept of DAICO or big multisig schemes “schnorr”).
I strongly believe Bitcoin is the most dominant crypto out there and it will likely stay that way, it is the most decentralized network, and has the best distribution (community size, adoption, developers, research papers). Even if something better comes along it will be implemented on Bitcoin itself in no time.
However I don’t think there will be just one single coin (i.e Bitcoin) but an explosion of coins, tokens and assets targeting various aspects of the global economy built on decentralized networks. Stratis is building the tools and have the expertise to create and test such networks, that’s also the reason I help the glu.lu team to build a marketplace for such assets.
Do you see any room for improvements in Stratis?
Improvements can always be made, a significant improvement that has been made is our approach to testing headed up by our testing team. The development of our internal suite of tools enables us to be a step ahead when ensuring that our products are ready for adoption.
Increasing the awareness of the Stratis Platform outside of traditional blockchain events is also something I feel we should focus on, there are many .NET Developer events and meetups where we can spread awareness and knowledge of our platform.
What is the thing that thrives and motivates you to build a better platform every single day?
The idea that we are building the next version of the internet.
What’s your future vision for Stratis and what is the thing you hope to achieve in the long-term for Stratis?
One thing that really interests me is decentralized sidechains, Stratis has a few designs and ideas on this area.
Additionally, I hope that Stratis becomes the go-to platform for the C# developer community when they want to build decentralized networks.
When does Stratis succeed in your opinion?
Deploying many different sidechains on top of the Stratis network with countless smart contracts that solve all kind use-cases in various industries.
And having numerous decentralized networks that build on top of our technology employing countless developers.
And I would like to end with giving an opportunity to say anything you still want to say to the community or in general
Crypto is here to stay no doubt and the things we are building at Stratis are long lasting, our community is growing by the day and new code contributors appear all the time, we are growing and this is in a bear market.
Decentralized networks are by definition unstoppable, it’s only a matter of time.
Thanks a lot, Dan for taking the time to answer all of the questions and sharing all of this information. Follow Dan on Twitter here.
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Other things to keep your eyes on:
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