Block.one speaks to Kestutis Januskevicius and Liucijus Urmonas, Co-founders of Codum, about a DAPP that aims to empower coders

How would you describe your DAPP?

Kestutis & Liucijus: Codum is a community-driven code marketplace for all programming languages and for the entire software industry. Built on EOSIO and Git, it offers a custom web user experience for everyone from software developers to managers and even their customers. It is a project management workspace that integrates coding, smart contracts and licensing, and accounting and finance. Git source code repositories have a public metadata option that allows for the repositories to be discovered, while hashed file checksums secure the licensed content without publicly exposing the code itself. Knife nodes screen all incoming hashes and compare them against licenses to detect violations.

Where did your initial idea come from?

Kestutis & Liucijus: Liucijus Urmonas and I have a long history of private software development contracting — running projects for businesses. What we couldn’t understand was why large software development companies were not motivated to save time and reuse open source code, or their existing private code, to accelerate the process. We found that developers were reinventing the wheel each time. We started to look at how to optimize this and Codum was born.

Can you introduce your team?

Kestutis & Liucijus: Myself and Liucijus Urmonas are the co-founders. As CTO, I’m an experienced software developer who has been coding professionally since 2000. I wrote the Codum White Paper back in September 2017 and then improved it with EOSIO during the winter of 2018. Liucijus is CEO and a creative entrepreneur with an extensive experience in multinational business development. He was the one who identified the deficiencies in current existing software industry processes. Gediminas Skirmontas is a designer who also brings his engineering talent to the team, and Karolina Jasaitytė recently joined us as CCO. We also have a pool of developers.

What stage is the project at?

Kestutis & Liucijus: Codum is now at the feasibility and public acceptance testing stage. We are continually updating the White Paper and improving the system design, based on feedback. At the same time, with the help of our still small but growing community, we are updating our marketing materials, such as explainer videos, website and support materials like FAQs. We are looking for advice from expert advisors and will be skipping the glitz of ICO shows as we plan our development phase.

Why did you decide to use blockchain technology, and specifically the EOSIO platform?

Kestutis & Liucijus: There are no secure means to exchange code as value yet, which makes software developers like shoemakers without shoes. Blockchain and smart contracts can solve this; however, before EOSIO there was no feasible infrastructure to handle the task at scale. The performance that EOSIO smart contracts have, running C++ code compiled into WebAssembly, is impressive. Free transactions makes it economically feasible as no developer would pay US$10 to do a git push, never mind waiting minutes for the transaction to be completed.

How has the EOS Community responded to your project?

Kestutis & Liucijus: The responses have only been positive, which makes us a bit worried… We are lacking constructive criticism! As we are still self-funded, that limits our marketing possibilities, but from the people we have met — including block producer representatives and other EOS community members; not only developers but potential users of Codum — we have the support we need to move forward. We had our first ever live public presentation on 4 July at the EOS London Meetup and the feedback was that we “stole the show”. That’s very motivating. We also welcome anyone who wants to join the Codum Telegram community.

Codum co-founders Kestutis and Liucijus are speaking at EOS London Meetup

More information on the Codum App available on https://codum.io