Welcome to Research & Development
Dear readers, I have the pleasure to introduce you to the R&D “department” of Kryha. In truth, the entire company is a Research & Development machine, but we tend to split the crazy stuff from the day to day business operations. As we are a Blockchain Studio with a focus on consultancy, our live projects rely on technology that is currently available and under development, making sure that all our projects are production-ready.
On the other hand, we also built this:
Pre-alpha technology deployed on untested, undocumented, and unsupported devices. But hey, it worked and we won the largest blockchain hackathon in the world.
“This team gives us a new way of programming code. Figuring out how to get the software on the robots so they know how to behave is a big deal. This is a very new way of figuring out how we can program robots; not just one robot, but swarms of them.” -Vinay Gupta, CEO of Mattereum
At Kryha we don’t really have the option to stop innovating since Distributed Ledger Technology is an extremely fast-moving space. If we want to maintain being a leading player in the industry, we need to innovate hard and fast. Our software development processes are bleeding edge and our R&D has to be revolutionary.
At the moment, Kryha R&D is working on two projects:
- Lockchain, a fully decentralized, ownerless bike sharing platform in Amsterdam which is under heavy development.
- Grex, a decentralized hive mind, on which for the past months we have been performing research and the paper in collaboration with MIT Media Lab will be published soon.
Lockchain started as a simple concept:
How can we enable everybody who wants to share their bike for a fee, actually do it, without having to rely on third parties?
The technology proved to be a challenge as we found out that developing native Ethereum clients on iOS and Android to be pretty “annoying” (calling it mildly, Jesse can share with you his misery). This was necessary in order to make the platform avoid relying on API servers and gateways.
Some thought, including me, that we could run full nodes on the bike locks themselves. That was not the “greatest” idea… So we rely on a challenge-response and cryptographic signing through a Bluetooth connection to the user’s phone. As a result, the bikes no longer require a data connection and the devices consume a minimal amount of energy.
We will share further details once the first version is live and we hope people will jump on board to take advantage of the first decentralized, ownerless bike sharing platform in the world.
Grex… This is a tricky one, it’s not just a project, it’s a vision. At Kryha we see DLT as the enabler of new economies and business models, building a product and ICO-ing is cool, but changing the world is what we aim for.
It’s not just a project, it’s a vision.
We built a proof of concept of a decentralized swarm of robots in under 48 hours because we could and thought it was cool. But that was just the beginning. I could continue rambling on, but a structured series of articles should explain this better.
The series of articles will be about Grex and how to build a decentralized hive mind. Please enjoy the long trailer, 20 minutes:
Whom am I: My name is Dan Acristinii and I work as Head of Research & Development at Kyha.
Kryha is a blockchain studio, where we help organizations understand and engage with blockchain technology. We’re a multidisciplinary team of young blockchain enthusiasts, working closely together with our clients in order to guide them through the process of ideation to development.
