Catching Up with Quantstamp
The exponential growth of smart contracts has fueled great interest in Quantstamp from both the blockchain community and traditional enterprises. We’ve been heads down hiring new team members, forming global partnerships, and most importantly releasing the automated audit protocol for Y Combinator Demo Day. Everyone on the team has excelled in their efforts, and we’re proud and excited to reflect on the following achievements.
We worked hard to ship our live demo ahead of schedule and we have also been traveling around the world meeting major enterprises, promising startups, and top universities working in the blockchain space. Together, we are seeking opportunities to collaborate toward the common goal of enabling the mainstream adoption of secure smart contracts.
Now that we’ve had some time to reflect and look back, I’m delighted to announce some of our partnerships, achievements, and hires that we’ve been working on, as well as some of the things we’re looking forward to in the coming weeks and months.
Quantstamp has made leaps and bounds with:
- Our live product
- Research partnerships
- Our presence in Japan
- Stellar additions to our team
QSP application shipped early
I’m extremely proud of our product team who were able to ship our live demo and testnet ahead of schedule. To date, we’ve executed over 400 automated smart contract reports. Quantstamp is one of the few projects to have a live working product out today that is also generating revenue.
University research partnerships
While smart contract security is a burgeoning space, the tools and techniques for computer-aided reasoning and smart contract security auditing are in their nascency. Quantstamp believes supporting the academic community will cement long term partnerships that could lead to new innovations for our platform. Quantstamp has strong roots in academia — our team is comprised of researchers who have degrees including PhDs from the University of Waterloo. We recognize the value that research can bring to the industry.
As a result, we are collaborating with Professor Prateek Saxena at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Saxena and his team’s work on cryptocurrencies and security have led to some of the largest and most successful projects in the industry, including Zilliqa, Kyber Network and Truebit. Dr. Saxena’s team also developed Oyente, a groundbreaking analysis tool for smart contracts. By funding his research, we’re pushing forward the standards of smart contract security as well as developing a long-term partnership that will help us add new tools and techniques to our platform. Quantstamp is committed to further contributing to the development and maintenance of the open source tools that will be generated through research at NUS.
Japan is living in the future
We believe that Japan will be one of the foremost markets for the adoption of blockchain technology because of its advancements in regulation and infrastructure. Forward looking sentiment of major enterprises in Japan who are willing to launch products and services that utilize smart contracts as part of their core functionality is at an all-time high.
After successfully graduating Y Combinator and completing the accelerator’s Demo Day, we traveled to Japan to attend the Ethereum Community Fund’s kick-off event. As detailed in our recent Medium post, Quantstamp is supporting the Ethereum Community Fund, a financial endowment to support and aid projects in building crucial open-source infrastructure, tooling, and applications for the Ethereum Ecosystem.
During our trips to Japan, we’ve witnessed real interest from both large financial institutions as well as startups on creating and validating secure smart contracts. Our first trip in February led to a deep relationship with Quoine, a leading FSA-compliant Japanese cryptocurrency exchange. We are advising them on smart contract security and plan to incorporate Quantstamp’s security auditing API. This will enable Quoine to validate newly listed tokens in a far more automated and safe manner.
On our most recent trip, we sat down with nearly 30 different organizations, including some of the most prominent companies in the country and discussed potential enterprise engagements and partnership opportunities that will multiply the interest of new participants. We’ve been so impressed by the overwhelming interest we’ve seen in Japan that we’ve decided to co-found the Neutrino Blockchain Co-working Space, where we can collaborate in Tokyo. As an infrastructure project, we feel that the ability to work in close collaboration with other blockchain projects will lead to great opportunities for everyone involved. We look forward to being part of several events in the future that will contribute to building a vibrant Japanese developer community.
Hiring industry leaders
At Quantstamp, one of our greatest assets has been our team, and as we expand, we’re focused on keeping that advantage by hiring top talent.
Olga V. Mack, former General Counsel at ClearSlide and in-house counsel at Visa, is now our VP of Strategy. Olga is an experienced startup advisor who has also served on the leadership board of the Association of Corporate Counsel, and has co-founded Women on Boards — an advocacy group for professional women. She graduated from the University of Berkeley law school.
Linda Selker, former Vice President/Associate General Counsel at Visa and Senior IP counsel at HP, has joined us as VP of Legal. Linda played a key role extending security technology designed to protect account credentials used in mobile wallets. Linda has a JD from Georgetown University’s School of Law, a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell, and received her bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Olga and Linda will help accelerate Quantstamp’s strategic, legal and compliance measures — they bring with them decades of experience having led legal departments at Fortune 100 companies and top-tier technology startups.
We’ve also recently onboarded Jeff Ward as our lead UI engineer. Jeff previously worked at the New York Stock Exchange as well as Consensys, where he helped developed decentralized Web 3.0 apps such as uPort. Jeff’s depth of experience in decentralized applications and the smart contract ecosystem will be a vital contribution to Quantstamp in creating a world-class decentralized platform.
Additionally, we are currently looking for a Head of Communications, who will lead strategy for internal and external communications. See our Careers page for more information on this as well as other openings.
What’s next
Next week, we will be attending EDCON Toronto. EDCON (Ethereum Development Community Conference) is a global conference with the purpose of improving communication and integration between Ethereum communities around the globe. EDCON is also hosting discussions by industry leaders including Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon, Vlad Zamfir and Joseph Lubin. These industry leaders will share the latest infrastructure developments with the community including progress on proof-of-stake, scalability, privacy and security.
Key members of our team will be there, including our CTO Steven Stewart, who will be presenting on “Computer-aided reasoning for smart contracts”, along with researchers from MIT and other leading institutions and projects in the security space.
While not exhaustive, these are just some of the many things we are doing to build a safer and more inclusive smart contract ecosystem. We could not have done this without you, our community.
Quantstamp’s mission is to facilitate the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology and to enable blockchain technology to achieving its full potential. In order to solve the security issues within our space, we are collaborating with the best projects and experts in the field and we are building relationships with enterprise companies that we believe will be the first to bring smart contracts to the masses.
In the future, we hope to tell you more about how we are continuing to develop our state-of-the-art protocol and how we are continuing to initiate key partnerships within the space that will have a direct impact on the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. We don’t only want to be a part of the cryptocurrency world, we want to help shape it.
Be sure to check back May 15th when we’ll announce more exciting news about collaborations, hires, and events.
