We’re excited to announce that Stan James is joining the Origin Protocol team full time. Stan is a world class engineer with extensive experience in a wide-range of fields, including everything from game design to computer vision, robotics and even machine learning. He has years of experience working with early stage startups and an invaluable background as a highly successful startup founder. He’ll be joining our engineering team and helping to lead our efforts on early protocol and DApp development.

I met Stan in 2007 when I moved to Boulder to participate in the TechStars program. Stan had founded a company called Lijit Networks that was later acquired by Federated Media. I remember Stan sharing his vision for Lijit as a way for people to know who they could trust on the internet. Lijit was based on his MS thesis project of a decentralized trust network. He talked about the “transitive property of trust” and how complete strangers could trust each other even without knowing each other. Keep in mind, this was in 2007 and Bitcoin hadn’t been invented yet.

Fast forward to this past summer when I was catching up with Stan and sharing my excitement after coding some smart contracts for the Ethereum network. We talked about how blockchain technology was not just a store of value, but how smart contracts and programmable money had the potential to change everything. I explained how all kinds of intermediaries could be replaced with this new technology, not just banks and financial institutions. His eyes lit up as we riffed on how blockchains allow people to collaborate in a trustless fashion, and how new layers of trust will need to be built like standardized protocols for ratings and reviews. “This is what I was trying to do in 2005!” he exclaimed.

Stan James

At the time, Stan was leading a development team at a game company, but his interest was piqued. He dived into Ethereum and IPFS and started contributing to our codebase. After seeing his enthusiasm and quality of his contributions, it was an easy decision for us to ask him to join us full time.

Besides being an top-notch engineer, Stan has always impressed me with his creativity and willingness to give first. He makes incredible beach art that is appreciated by thousands on Instagram and and he’s built some really fun and addictive games like Handybird (seriously, you’ve got to check it out). We couldn’t be more excited to have him join us in building the sharing economy of tomorrow.

Welcome to the team, Stan!

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