In order to professionalize our corporate structure, I co-founded Confio GmbH – the bigger brother of Confio OÜ. It's a fully remote development company employing a growing team of almost 20 people across Europe. Our current focus is to realize the Tgrade blockchain ecosystem for regulated DeFi as well as maintaining the CosmWasm smart contracting technology.
I joined in the early days to work out the idea multi-blockchain smart contracts based on WebAssembly containers (CosmWasm). Over the months, the team grew from two people to a dozen causing significant mentoring responsibility. I then led the development of the virtual machine as well as the client side framework CosmJS. With this free software offering, Confio established itself as a core contributor to the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem.
As a senior software developer, I developed the multi blockchain library IOV Core. Over time I took on more responsibilities and mentored three small teams while overseeing the company's overall technology stack. In October 2019 we successfully launched a name service on a Tendermint-based blockchain.
Looking for a proof of work alternative I stumbled into Lisk, the first blockchain community I joined. In the first weeks I analyzed key management and signing security. Along the way I contributed a bunch of bugfixes to the blockchain node and the wallet. Later I worked on network security. I fixed a critical bug that caused a network halt and later discovered and responsibly disclosed a critical transaction malleability bug in Lisk and its forks.
In a small team of 3 iOS devs, one Android and one backend dev we developed a mobile chat application from MVP stage to a solid production ready application with thousands of users. The work included big refactorings of existing code, integration of the chat SDK Layer and design of a JSON:API over REST backend.
I co-founded the secure communication solution Kullo. Kullo's objective was to create an email alternative that is end-to-end encrypted and very user-friendly at the same time. The startup was funded by a grant from the European Social Fund as well as business angels. After 2 years of development, we brought Kullo for Desktop to market in 2015, followed by mobile apps for iOS and Android one year later. Incorporating feedback of users and customers, we significantly improved the UX over time under the constraints that come with securely encrypted data.
I studied Mathematics with Computer Science as a minor and wrote a Bachelor's thesis in the field of post quantum cryptography at the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt.