Dan Larimer

Dan Larimer has been a successful entrepreneur with businesses in the area of software. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, he has been actively involved with Bitshares, Steemit and now EOS. He has been coming out with innovative solutions using cryptocurrencies over the years.

At the moment, he serves as the chief technology officer of BlockOne and CEO of Cryptomex. BlockOne is the organization behind EOS whereas Cryptomex focuses on the development of blockchains and blockchain applications.

Before Crypto

Dan has a bachelor of engineering certificate in computer science from Virginia Tech. His adventure with computing did not begin at Virginia Tech, but in his childhood, when he was exposed to computers and began experimenting with them. This led to him developing an interest in building things. In addition to this, Dan Larimer learned about Economics and got into libertarianism and volunteerism. All these, coupled with his desire to be his own boss set him on the path to becoming the important innovator he is in the cryptocurrency world.

Albeit being an entrepreneur, Larimer’s motivation to get into cryptocurrencies was not monetary gain but rather the idea of a peaceful world devoid of violence. Virtual currencies were a way of achieving this goal in Dan’s view. While researching into this, he found out about Bitcoin in 2010 and became one of the first people on the Bitcoin forum discussing the technology.

As Dan got to understand more about the technology, he became aware of Bitcoin’s scaling problem and the fact that it could not be easily used as a multipurpose platform.

Creating Bitshares

Bitshares was Dan’s attempt to create a cryptocurrency that could scale and have multiple uses as well. In 2014, with Charles Hoskinson, Dan Larimer secured funding from Bitfund venture capital firm and created Bitshares.

Bitshares’ Graphene-powered blockchain is capable of handling 100,000 transactions per second. The platform also comes with a decentralized exchange (DEX) and distributed autonomous companies (DACs). The DACs are companies that are more decentralized, open and global.

Next Was Steem

Dan Larimer left Bitshares because he felt it was impossible to attract more people to adopt the cryptocurrency without making core changes to it. He cited funding as another problem that forced him to leave. Larimer did not walk out of the cryptocurrency community but started a new project.

This new project was Steem, a blockchain-based decentralized social media network. Steem was easier to sell as an idea because it had incentives for participation. Steemit is the social media platform built on the Steem blockchain. It has attracted even people with no idea about cryptocurrencies simply because of the incentive for sharing content. Steem is also Graphene-powered and thus can handle a huge amount of transactions in a second.

Steem has been quite successful so far. Lots of new users can’t wait to be approved to join the platform. The platform is one of the few that have been touted as the answer to be centralization problem of social media giants like Facebook.

Would He Leave EOS Too?

EOS is Dan’s latest project. It is already in the top five list of cryptos by market cap. The EOS mainnet is yet to be launched but investors seem to be aware of the potential impact it would have if successful.

With EOS, developers can build fast and easy to use blockchains and smart contract platforms. As explained in this article, the platform would be more of an operating system. The EOS platform is also being built to be able to scale to handle up to a million transactions per second.

Blockchain technology is still young. In these early days, it is the work of innovators like Dan Larimer that would help us see where weaknesses are and where new opportunities for applications exist. Dan has, however, said that there would be no reason for him to leave EOS since he could simply build any project he wanted on the EOS platform in the future. Hence, the EOS community need not fear his departure for further experiments in the future.