Into The Blocks- Jamal O’Garro

Accelerating the growth of the Blockchain Developer ecosystem, one dApp at a time

In the third installment of our series titled Into The Block where we interview Jamal O’Garro, a fellow from Bridge Academy 2018 Cohort.

1. Hi Jamal, firstly, tell us about your experience at Bridge in one word?

Excellent!

2. Now, let’s talk about how things went about your project? What did you build during your three months here at Bridge? Did you perform to your expectations or you think you could have done better?

I built the beginning of a decentralized exchange and trading platform called Metro, which enables users to trade ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The type of exchange that I built is technically called relayer and simply hosts a public order book of buy and sell orders for ERC20 tokens and matches those trades without having to actually hold the tokens or trader funds. All transactions happen directly between the traders involved and are verified and settled immediately on the blockchain.

I changed my project idea about halfway through the program (I was originally working on Venmo for Bitcoin) and was writing my own smart contracts to verify funds and settle trades on the blockchain until my mentor, Ramon Recuero, told me about 0x. The 0x project is a protocol for creating decentralized exchanges on the Ethereum blockchain. They pretty much provided all of the tools I needed to create a decentralized exchange so I abandoned all of my previous work and started rebuilding Metro on it.

I decided to rebuild Metro about a week before my project was due so I didn’t get to add as many features as I would have liked. What I was able to complete was a server that would host the public order book, accept and create new orders, match open orders and settle any trades that were matched by the matching engine I wrote. I was also able to work on the beginnings of an enterprise-grade desktop trading user interface, written on top of Electron, that will allow traders to view public order books in real-time, see real-time market data and price information as well as execute, modify and cancel orders.

3. How does the road look like going ahead for you? What are you planning to achieve in the next 6 months?

Going forward, I plan to continue to work on Metro but I think I want to host a public order book for different securities supported by multiple protocols including ones that allow the trading of debt and derivative instruments. Other protocols that I’m looking to incorporate into Metro are Dharma (debt) and dY/dX (derivatives). Since I build trading software for a living I have noticed that a lot of the existing solutions lack the full featured functionality that one may find at a large asset manger, proprietary trading firm or hedge fund. Metro can fill a huge gap for both proprietary and institutional traders interested in trading the instruments I plan to support on the platform. Long story short; I think there is a huge opportunity here.

I also plan to enhance the Metro matching engine so that it will match orders in a combined order book consisting of orders from many decentralized exchanges spanning across multiple instrument types and protocols. I also plan to write and deploy market making algorithmic and systematic trading strategies that will provide liquidity to Metro and these other decentralized exchanges. I feel that getting into this space early may prove to be a lucrative endeavor especially if and when decentralized exchanges take off. The cool thing is that I work on a lot of similar systems at work so what I do during my day-to-day is directly transferable to this project.

4. How did you feel about the mentor support?

I feel that the mentor support that I received was great. My mentor had a wealth of knowledge about blockchain development, the Ethereum ecosystem and dApp building best practices. He was always available when I had quick questions to ask on Slack and was very flexible when scheduling our weekly one-on-one meetings since my schedule can be a little unpredictable working finance industry hours and teaching a university course during the evenings.

5. What’s that one thing you’d like to see change in the Blockchain Tech scenario?

I would like to see faster block times.

6. Which project do you think currently has the best team out there?

Though I chose the Ethereum track during the fellowship I think Blockstack’s team is pretty solid because they have built a very impressive product.

7. If you were to invest $1M in crypto startup out there, which one would you choose and why?

Metro(Confident, eh?), because it’s going to change the game! ;)

About Jamal O’Garro

Born and raised in New York City, Jamal decided to learn how to code after leaving a career in finance to become more involved in New York’s bustling tech scene. After taking an “Intro to Rails” course at General Assembly he shortly started working as a developer at several NYC based startups where he helped launch MVPs and build an internal analytics reporting suite. When he’s not busy hacking on personal projects you can find him shooting street photography and documentary films around the City.