Back in October last year, I remember blogging about Holberton Software Engineering School in San Francisco.

Their brilliantly simple idea, in conjunction with Bitproof, that the blockchain would be the perfect, fraud-proof home for degree certificates, struck a chord both inside and outside the blockchain ecosystem.

Up to that point, at Yope we had been concentrating primarily on payment systems, originally aimed at games developers, and later widening the scope to encompass all kinds of applications.

We don’t believe in walled gardens. We open-sourced our payment API so that everyone who finds a use for it can use it free of charge. It’s a work in progress — feel free to fork it or use it as it is :)

But after I blogged about Holberton, an interesting thing happened. We started talking more about non-payment applications for Bitcoin and other blockchains. We began to move our focus away from financial transactions and figure out all the other interesting things you can do with the blockchain.

We also moved away from exclusively using the Bitcoin blockchain to a more blockchain-agnostic model and began developing on Ethereum, in parallel with our other work.

We started working on other projects. We’re a tight-knit team of development professionals who also happen to be blockchain enthusiasts. Some of us have worked together before: others in the collective met through friends. But the one thing that we share is a commitment to see our projects through and launch applications that will truly change the way people transact with and relate to each other.

Soon, we started scoping and building a new kind of social network: one where your education certificates and career contacts and referees can be stored and authenticated in one place. To call it LinkedIn on the blockchain is too simplistic: it’s going to be far more than that.

The reason I’m writing this tonight is that we submitted this proposal, along with details of our previous work, to Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, who felt our work was worth sponsoring.

We have been funded and will receive the sponsorship in instalments, after proving we have met each of the milestones we have agreed.

We want this to be a transparent process and will be sharing our progress with the wider community. We’ve also begun working out of the amazing Transistor co-working space in Berlin. Look out for daily tweets from our development team describing the highs and lows of the project, and we’ll also share some ‘how-to’ guides along the way.

We’d like to think we’re bringing a revolution to the work ecosystem, and we couldn’t be more excited!