Meet MELD — Dat Duong Thanh

Senior Blockchain Engineer 👨‍💻

Stuart

Published in

MELD

5 min readOct 21, 2022

Welcome to Meet MELD

This is a series to provide some insight and understanding of the faces behind the MELD team. We have a vast range of engineers, designers, economists, advisors, and researchers from all parts of the world including the United States, Norway, Sweden, Vietnam, Japan, and Canada, and with more partnerships, new team members, and advisors joining the MELD team, this list just keeps on expanding and getting better!

Continue reading to find out about Dat’s role with MELD…

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❓ Questions and answers…

Dat Duong Thanh — LinkedIn Profile

Dat has strong knowledge of computer science foundations and fundamentals, including Networks, Database Systems, Computer Organization, and Operating Systems. He’s interested in algorithms, and their applications, and wants to apply his knowledge of algorithms to solve real-world problems.

What’s your job position at MELD + what do you do for MELD?

Officially, I’m a Senior Blockchain Engineer. I’m in charge of a team of 5 including myself. Our main duties are to write code and review the code. We also write out whitepapers and various docs aligning with the MELD vision. And of course, we build blockchain components for the MELD protocol.

What did you do before working with MELD?

Before MELD I was working for a US-based fintech company, where we had an office in Vietnam. Here, I was the Engineering Owner of Anduin Data Room (anduinroom.io): A secure data room product tailored for private investments. We were focusing on building a platform to streamline private investment — Fund subscriptions. When a fund wants to raise more, they have to go through a lot of paperwork and processes that can take 3–6 months, typically. We were building a platform to automate most of this stuff. That was my first job, and I worked there for 5 years.

Before this, I had a Software Engineering internship with Google where I designed and implemented a Google Play SDK library allowing Android apps to self-check alpha/beta testing status, amongst others.

I realized I prefer startup companies over big companies for lots of reasons. I get more hands-on experience working with startups, I like having more responsibility and seeing my work be more impactful in a meaningful way.

I have also competed in an International Olympiad in Informatics. This is a competitive programming contest for high school students where each country gets to send 4 competitors to complete.

When did you first get involved in crypto?

To be honest, when I joined MELD I didn’t have much experience/involvement with crypto. Several months before joining MELD, I was contacted by Hai and we had a chat where he briefed me on crypto.

I’m not a master of everything, but I can learn things very quickly. I didn’t really have a background in Haskell, but I knew Scala very well which is also a functional programming language, so there are some similarities on that front which made learning Haskell much easier.

I spent about 1-month learning basic knowledge about Haskell and blockchain technology and spent about 1-week learning solidity where I wrote some contracts locally and made some deployments to get a feel for the language. I then took the interview, passed it, and joined MELD.

What do you like the most about crypto?

It removes the barriers between people. Everything is transparent. The whole history is transparent. You can’t cover up anything because you can go back and see all the commits.

I really like thinking more about decentralization. When we have that, it opens the door for a lot of things. When we remove trust, everything is based on code and algorithms and the efficiency of operations can increase massively. Maybe it’s because I’m an Engineer and have a coding background that makes me think this.

Most components you see within blockchain technology are not new. Most of them were made 30 years ago or so. The thing interesting about the blockchain is that it combines all of these inventions into one big system where everything is working together.

Blockchain tech is fairly new so there are so many opportunities to build something new that hasn’t been done before whereas it’s very hard to invent something new in non-crypto.

Do you have any predictions on where crypto will be 5 years from now?

Honestly, I’m interested more in the tech side of blockchains. I’m hoping in the next few years people will come up with solutions to solve all the problems we are having.

Blockchain is not a 100% perfect solution, yet. You have to balance block time, storage, and network requirements to run nodes. Sometimes the gas fees are too high, or the network is congested or it could be ineffective to store the whole history of transactions.

I hope all these problems can be solved by more great engineers joining and devoting more time and energy to the blockchain space. There are many refinements that can be made to the current systems and I hope by 5 years from now, we will start to see these be a staple for blockchain technology.

What do you like doing outside of crypto and MELD?

I love playing with my 1-year-old daughter, she is my first priority. I also love to learn more about history. I‘m a really big history nerd. Most of my reading time, if I’m not reading technologies, I’m reading histories. As for sports, I love watching soccer, specifically Manchester United!

MELD — Be Your Own Bank

We think it’s essential for everyone to gain control of their financial lives and have equal access to financial instruments used by professionals, not just centralized institutions, governments, or the 1%. We want to provide financial freedom and control to the masses, including the unbanked.

We have a long-term goal to enable the $15 trillion that is currently locked out of the global economy, including 2 billion individuals worldwide that are either underbanked or have no access to banking services whatsoever, access to these tools. These are the people that are paying the highest fees, and getting the worst customer service, and they are the ones that are having the most problems.

Our vision is to create an ecosystem that empowers individuals to regain financial control by providing them with the tools and services they need to manage their money on their terms. Whether that be creating a collateralized debt position (CDP) with cryptocurrency, earning an interest return for lending fiat to borrowers, or even participating in reward incentive programs, we strive to provide our users with the functions they need to manage their own financial lives.