We’ve moved into new offices, our team is growing fast, and our product offering is developing nicely. We have a few updates for you this week regarding the following:

Exchange listings

Spotlight on Julien Deray, the latest addition to the development team

Protocol updates

Branding Updates

Head of Communications Update

Exchange Listings

We are pleased to inform you that we are making progress with another larger exchange. We are in the process of finalising details and will hopefully have an announcement in the next couple of weeks; we cannot tell you when exactly, since as you’ve seen before when there are too many moving parts these estimates end up inaccurate since they are out of our hands.

Team Interviews: Julien Deray, Backend Engineer

We have a new addition to our dev team! Julien Deray, a french software engineer with startup, open-source, and academic experience. We had a chat with him the other day where he expressed his views about Aventus, his journey, and his interest in crypto.

Can you first introduce yourself please, tell us a bit about you?

I am a 25 years old French software engineer. I am — of course — a tech enthusiast, I started to learn how to code at the age of 14 and never stopped since. I quickly understood that the internet was going to be quite a big deal and wanted to be part of the journey! Like most « hackers » I love being challenged and Aventus looks like a good place to innovate and think out of the box.

What is it that you do at Aventus?

I am a back-end engineer, working on pretty much every layer between the Blockchain and the UIs.

Tell us a bit about your education; you are young, but have lots of professional experience.

After high-school I spent 2 years in uni, leading to an HND-like degree in computer science. The idea was to be operational, and be able to get in a famous French engineering school which provides a specific curriculum: work part-time in the tech industry, alongside with the lessons.

So I ended up quickly with a master’s degree and 3-ish years of experience. The company I was working at is very into Open-Source and they gave me the chance to work on loads of projects, from a TCK for Google and RedHat to a scalable PaaS based on a cluster of Raspberry Pi.

I also had the opportunity to do internships in Ireland and New Zealand.

When did you first hear and start learning about crypto? What is the most interesting thing about it to you?

I heard about crypto when I was in high-school but didn’t really dig too much into it (I would’ve forgotten my wallet anyway ;) ). More recently, I have seen the number of blockchain startups in London growing and it picked my attention.

To me, the most interesting part is the Ethereum blockchain. It makes so much sense! I like to see it as a version of the internet as we thought it would be: distributed, open, reliable. The internet failed on these points but maybe it was only to bootstrap something that can really change the world.

What do you hope to achieve at Aventus? What are you particularly excited to work on?

As I said, I think that the blockchain can be a proper revolution. So as a concert-addict, if I can help people get better and cheaper tickets, that’ll be already a good thing. But if I can help Aventus being a major actor in the blockchain revolution, that’s even better!

How can the community get more involved with what you are doing at Aventus?

The technologies around the blockchain are still quite young and, as we grow, we are probably going to use and/or develop open-source libraries. I hope to play a key role in creating some of these libraries and modules, given my past experience. This will give the community an opportunity to be involved at a very operational and concrete level, which I find interesting.

What are your hobbies?

I spend a lot of time building and playing with 3D printers, printing loads of not-so-useful stuff (that interestingly ended up being quite useful in the office, e.g. laptop/phone holders!). I also listen to music several hours a day (mostly metal 🤘). Oh, and I have an ant nest at home!