Talk to Zane for a few minutes and it will become clear to you that he’s really passionate and knowledgeable about blockchain and cryptocurrency. I admire his confidence and appreciate his sense of urgency in getting things done. Zane very quickly became an integral part of our team. Read below what our rising star has to say!

Zane Grube — our rising star!

Cynthia: Hi Zane, you are our youngest team member. Tell us about your background and how you got involved in the blockchain and cryptocurrency community so early.

Zane: I’ve been aware of cryptocurrencies since 2013, but only seriously started to get involved last fall as a break from my classwork. Around this time, I was playing a lot of poker online and became interested in trading as a bit of a dual to that. I decided that the barrier to trading securities was too high for me at the time, so I fell into cryptocurrencies instead. After investing in and really getting involved in the Ethereum community, I started to wake up to how much this technology was going to change our world and got involved in the math behind blockchains and a bit of Solidity development over summer 2017. I was working in an experimental physics lab at Indiana University, but could hardly keep focused — every night, I’d go home and read white papers or play around with Remix. I was really looking for an ‘in’ to the space and a more concrete opportunity to contribute to the growth of the blockchain sector. So, I was very excited to join One Daijo in August.

Cynthia: There are so many blockchain projects out there. Why One Daijo?

Zane: I think One Daijo is unique in its maturity relative to other projects right now. There is a well-documented overeagerness for projects to churn out ICOs, and the community is well aware of that now. However, many projects significantly overvalue themselves or bite off more than they can chew. The largest players in this space still have not necessarily attracted the top talent from industry and academia, so I can imagine that many dominant forces in blockchain in the coming years are currently in their early stages or may have not yet been conceived. One Daijo appeals to me because I don’t see undue haste or an impatience to get to market to take advantage of the current fundraising climate. I also feel strongly that the regulations placed on blockchain companies in the next year will cripple many existing projects and open them up to legal vulnerabilities which their teams are simply not prepared for. One Daijo knocks this out of the park with its strong focus on compliance.

Cynthia: What do you do at One Daijo and what are you most excited about working on with One Daijo?

Zane: My official title is “Blockchain/Software Engineer”, but I do a bit of everything. I worked on everything from our social media strategy, to the contract ecosystem you see in our GitHub, to the QIN Token Mechanism that is one of the most innovative things One Daijo has created. I look forward to 1) working on the blockchain-specific aspects of our platform: writing contracts and streamlining users’ interactions with aspects of Ethereum or another platform that they may not be familiar with, and 2) working with customer and network data to continue fleshing out the QIN Token Mechanism. This second task is going to require careful experiment design, and it combines multiple buzzwordy fields like game theory and machine learning — so it sits in a very exciting place.

Cynthia: What are your views on the Ethereum chain and other chains out there? How do they compare in your opinion?

Zane: To me, Ethereum is by far the most impressive and exciting thing going on in blockchain tech today. It is an amazing refinement of the original concept of a distributed ledger and extends the functionality of this idea to a turing-complete virtual machine, allowing anything users want to be built on an evermore efficient public chain. I’m consistently impressed by the insight and diligence of the Ethereum community and its core devs as they work on scaling solutions like Plasma. That said, there is certainly room for other platforms to grow and take their share of the spotlight. Something I’m very excited about is Cardano since even if it is far from full functionality, it is focused on being done ‘right’ and solves several efficiency problems with their unique consensus protocol. I’m still in the process of reading all their papers but what I’ve seen is very intriguing. I also appreciate the Stellar project for seeing that Ethereum’s unlimited versatility comes at an efficiency tradeoff, and realizing that many tasks users want from Ethereum can be replicated more efficiently on a purpose-built platform. I think the community would do well to consider Stellar when they are building lighter projects or ones that do not require complex autonomous logic from smart contracts.

Cynthia: What’s your opinion on ERC-20 and ERC-223?

Zane: ERC20 was a necessary first step in token standards, but I think most of the devoted Ethereum development community agrees that it could be improved on. Dexaran’s proposed ERC223 standard does solve some of the main ERC20 problems, but the standard is not yet a “standard”, so to speak, and different possible implementations of it exist. Importantly, developers should not rush to adopt a standard that is not finalized. I see implementations of ERC223 live on the Ethereum chain, when the original EIP for ERC223 still has ongoing discussions about major issues. That said, I think that improving the ERC20 standard will be important in the coming years to make Ethereum more user-friendly. As plasma rolls out and projects want to move on to sidechains, I am very excited to see how tokens will be used on Ethereum in the future.

Cynthia: What kinds of advice do you have for people who want to get into the blockchain and cryptocurrency space?

Zane: Be self-starting, and don’t expect hand-holding. There are so many aspects to and niches in the space that you can only get a good sense of what’s going on by going out and exploring yourself across all kinds of websites. Medium and Reddit will be the biggest sources of professional conversation, so start there. We are still in the stage as a community where we have not really figured out how to onboard people quickly, and everyone has their own unique story of how they got into crypto — whether that be through crypto-anarchy mailing lists in 2010 or by reading too much 4chan or seeing their Wall Street friends buy some. I think 2018 will be a huge year for crypto in the mainstream consciousness, and a lot of people will be jumping into a community that has traditionally been very opaque. The best you can do is be proactive (you don’t want to hear about everything after the markets have already reacted, do you?) and in turn be welcoming and informative when helping people who come in after you.

Cynthia: What occupies your time outside blockchain and One Daijo?

Zane: I play on Columbia’s Men’s Ultimate team, which is really a great experience and helps me decompress from work. I also spend a lot of time weightlifting, reading and exploring New York, particularly the restaurants.

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