Meet the teams: B9Lab — Driving developer adoption in web3
As stewards of the interchain, the Interchain Foundation (ICF) advances the creation of an interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized ecosystem. We do this by building basic protocols and funding teams working on developing and furthering the adoption of the Interchain Stack.
B9Lab is one of these Distributed Development Teams that the ICF works with. With a wealth of knowledge and experience in developer training, B9Lab maintains the Developer Portal, as well as operating our instructor-led Interchain Developer Academy.
In this series, written by the teams that the ICF works with, we explore the work they do and how it benefits the interchain.
B9Lab was founded in 2015 to empower developers confronted with new and disruptive technologies to make strategic and technical decisions and help fast-track their learning.
At that time, the predominant developer role in the industry could be described as a pioneering innovator — self-driven individuals with advanced developer skills, breaking new ground with a technology that was largely unfamiliar within the wider developer community. They were focused on getting things off the ground, not looking for rigorously thought-out documentation or a curated learning journey. Such things must be built from scratch, using the knowledge generated by those who go first.
However, no industry in history has been populated entirely with radical innovators, and with good reason. The skills and mindsets that revolutionize how something is done are not necessarily best suited to growing what they started into an established field of endeavor. The kind of developers seeking to make a career in these exciting new spaces do look for guidance and will seek out reliable systems of learning and support that will encourage them to thrive.
The capacity for blockchain organizations and ecosystems to drive developers to adopt their technology and build lasting products and careers is critical to the future of web3. Developers are the foundation of any successful ecosystem. Project founders and others who are active in any developer-facing role will recognize the importance of engaging skilled developers with their technology and retaining their commitment. The central challenge is identifying who can bring the needed skill set, and forming adoption strategies that account for varying degrees of familiarity with a particular technology and web3 as a whole.
This is what the Interchain Foundation wanted to achieve when they envisioned a three-year project to train 5,000 new developers to join the interchain, and they reached out to B9Lab to make it happen.
B9Lab and the Interchain Developer Academy
B9Lab is a global blockchain consultancy that helps organizations drive sustainable growth through web3 adoption strategies. We have led the way in developer adoption, both independently and alongside some of blockchain’s key organizations: most prominently in our work on the Interchain Developer Academy, but also partnering with Ethereum, the Linux Foundation, R3, and Tezos, as well as numerous developer-enabled projects.
We have designed, created, and delivered self-paced and instructor-led learning programs, and innovated highly effective methodologies for developer adoption. Our team of expert coders, educators, designers, and marketers support projects at every stage of development, from attracting early adopters to infinitely scaling the user base.
The Interchain Developer Academy was conceived as a means to onboard and train developers on the Interchain Stack. It represents a comprehensive training platform, transforming experienced web2 and web3 developers into a key part of the ecosystem. The program was designed from the ground up by B9Lab to provide a blend of theoretical and practical learning content. It culminates in a hands-on final exam that earns official certification from the Interchain Foundation, underlining the value of a demonstrably skilled workforce within a growing and highly competitive employment marketplace.
B9Lab created the Academy alongside the Developer Portal, a permanently open-access repository that offers an entry point for developers joining the ecosystem and a learning resource for existing community members — fundamentally important when developers want to quickly launch their projects. Both platforms were designed by B9Lab and maintained in collaboration with the Interchain Foundation. The Academy program is also delivered by B9Lab: alongside our administrative and community support teams, the same experts who produced the program content now serve as instructors to Academy participants.
Since May 2022, four cohorts totaling 850 alumni have completed the Academy, and B9lab is preparing a fifth cohort of 300 developers to start soon. Past participants have established and contributed to thriving web3 projects, in some cases finding employment as a direct consequence of their exposure to the interchain ecosystem and the organizations working with it. One member of our current cohort delivered a prize-winning performance in the latest code4rena competitive auditing contest before the Academy program had even finished!
B9Lab projects, past and future
B9Lab has delivered numerous developer training programs over the years, including the Consensys Academy, the Ethereum Blockstars Programmes, the Tezos Blockstars Programmes, and the Corda Learning Portal. We have also collaborated on a wide variety of other projects both inside and outside of web3.
We developed a first-of-its-kind NFT representing an equity ownership interest in the Mexican professional football club Necaxa, which was the world’s highest-value NFT trade at the time of sale. The project required working with financial regulators and developing a fully automated KYC across multiple countries, with registration conducted through a custom-built, one-process pipeline enclosed in a highly secure single page on the project website.
In a long-term partnership with Ingeniería Social, a Spanish cooperative economy company, we created Apambu, a 360° sustainability data and strategy management platform with extremely broad corporate appeal. Apambu allows companies to coordinate their sustainability planning, monitoring, record-keeping, and reporting activities, factors that are considered increasingly vital to many businesses in the current social, ecological, and economic contexts.
Early in 2023, we also shared the DevJAM whitepaper with our tech peers. As The Definitive Guide to Web3 Developer Adoption, it builds on a decade of experience in training developers to work with different blockchain technology stacks and helping organizations and ecosystems grow. It sets out our insights into how best to scale an invaluable body of developers that will allow the web3 industry as a whole to flourish.
If you want to know more about our work, feel free to reach out! We’re always interested in discussing ways to help move the industry forward.
