People of OST: Ankit Singh, Senior Software Engineer
Ankit Singh is a tech enthusiast with prior experience in retail banking systems. He received his engineering degree from VNIT Nagpur. In his spare time, Ankit likes to travel, learn about different cultures, and loves to play badminton and basketball. He also loves road trips.
Tell us about yourself!
I’m from Nagpur, It’s in the central part of India. In 2015, I completed my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology. Immediately after graduating, I joined Diebold Nixdorf in Mumbai. It’s main focus is in banking and payments. While working there, I got the opportunity to travel and work with one of the major banks in the middle-east region. I learned about the technicalities of the banking and payments industry. I then joined OST in mid 2018.
What excites you about blockchain?
I first heard about blockchain in 2017 while working in the banking domain itself. It was a buzzword, there were discussions about blockchain and how it can be complemented with banking. What excites me about blockchain is it’s decentralized and distributed nature. Users are not dependent on any particular entity, so they don’t need to trust any conglomerate or any big corporation. By design blockchain as we all know is resistant to modification of data. I also believe blockchain has an immense use case not only in payments but also in various sectors like supply chain, healthcare, insurance, and data storage.
What does your role as a Senior Software Engineer at OST entail?
When I joined in 2018, we were trying to solve the scaling of our platform. In December 2018, we started implementing on OST Platform. It was very interesting to start from scratch, develop, and implement everything. On a very broad level, I convert business requirements into perfectly scalable and fault tolerant working solutions. In order to do that, we discuss requirements and come up with a solution. Once the solution is finalized, we write the code and deliver the end product. We also have the role of creating and maintaining all the backend APIs.
What are you currently working on?
We have started getting feedback from users as well as partner companies on OST Platform. The key feedback request that came to our product team was to make the MetaMask extension optional so that users who want to use OST Platform can do so without the extension. We’re currently making the MetaMask extension optional. Apart from that, we will be releasing a feature called stable coin staking so that users will be able to stake stable coins or OST. In order to support that, there are some changes we have to make to the API.
What do you look forward to this year?
This is a really exciting year ahead, I’m looking forward to a couple of things. First is the implementation of our platform, I really want to see how our partner companies are going to implement our APIs and how the tech will be reaching the end users. Second is the transactions which will be coming from the end users. Blockchain technology will literally be in the hands of the end users and they’ll be using it through their mobile devices.
Thank you, Ankit!
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About OST
OST powers the future of brand loyalty. Innovators use OST Platform to reward behaviours and increase engagement with Brand Currency. It’s a complete set of developer tools that any company can integrate without any in-house blockchain expertise. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users and we will be rolling out live implementations throughout 2019. OST currently has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune, and is expanding to other markets. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures and 500 Startups.
