To continue our interview series, I’ll be interviewing Daniel Vitorino our Senior Software Architect. Since he’s much more technical than I am, I wanted to hear some blockchain insider info from someone who lives and breathes crypto.

So let’s get right into it.

me on the right!

In the Ethereum ecosystem, what do you think most people are underestimating?

I believe the difficulty to make technical parts of Ethereum transparent to end users is what’s blocking a mass-adoption boom from happening. If we want our ecosystem to grow quickly, it’s essential for Ethereum app development companies to heavily invest in UX and Interaction Design. Ideally, every software designed for a common user should focus on isolating the technical aspects from it. After all, who cares about hash keys, seed phrases or block confirmations. None of this has anything to do with the proposed business. If we, as dApps developers, don’t manage to overcome this barrier, we won’t succeed in reaching the general public.

At Auctus we strive to simplify any technical part of our platform. We’re constantly investing in designing the best user experience possible, without the technical jargon or steep learning curve.

Tell us a bit about your professional experience.

I’m a developer who has worked in the field since 2008. I climbed the career ladder very quickly and became a Developer Leader early in my professional life. In 2010, I got a job at DTI Digital where I got the opportunity to lead dozens of IT projects with several different teams, on a variety of business areas and industries, ranging from real estate managers to steel plants. On these projects, I faced all kind of challenges, both in development and management. These challenges helped me build a base of technical knowledge and skills that allowed me to understand and learn almost all architectural aspects of a digital platform.In late-2016, I was invited to work as a Digital Transformation Consultant in the largest bank of Latin America. Later, I was appointed to coordinate the Software Engineering for chatbots and digital attendance of the bank.

More recently, since March 2018, I’ve dedicated all my time to Auctus and using all the skills I developed over a decade to help my partners come up with the best solutions for our platform. Very exciting!

Roadtrip with my buddy

What do you find most surprising or intriguing about what’s going on in crypto/blockchain at the moment?

Even though there’s some nonsense hype where some are trying to “blockchain” everything, I think what’s positive is that it’s encouraging people to study and learn about blockchain development. The number of dApp developers is growing significantly. You can check any crypto development forum and see that the amount of threads has risen drastically in the last 20 months. As someone who is currently in the industry, I can say that this is very refreshing and energetic and it makes me believe in a promising future for blockchain.

Can you talk about an event that you think defines you as a person?

I’m a person who doesn’t quit easily. One of the most remarkable moments in my life, where this trait was crucial, was during a go-live of a massive platform, the MES (Manufacturing Enterprise System) of a German steel plant that runs in Brazil. About ten hours after the go-live, an odd and unexpected behavior started to duplicate the slabs creation on the database and, consequently, messing up the entire subsequent steps of the plant automation. After two days and a dozen frustrating deploys, my team was just “drying ice” by deleting the duplicates in the database. At that moment the company CTO came to me and said: “we’re doing the rollback; you guys are causing us to lose millions”. The rollback would mean literally losing two days of production which translates to loss of thousands of tons of steel produced, losing the client, and would mean that I failed as a technical leader.

I stood my ground, kept my faith high on the team and took a bold decision to answer back: “if you guys want, you can do it, my team will not support the rollback, we are going to find the solution for this”. Coworkers and partners came to me and told me I was crazy and that there was too much at risk, that I was even risking getting fired if things went wrong. Six hours after that conversation, we managed to find the solution. That moment was very important in my life and helped me consolidate a behavior that later would make me climb to higher ground.

Which feature of the Auctus platform excites you the most?

For me, the whole concept of maintaining and tracking retirement data on the blockchain makes perfect sense. You get everything automated: distribution, vesting, employer match and funds application. Unfortunately, the tokenization of traditional assets seems to still be a little further from now. Because of that, what is currently bringing light to my eyes is the Auctus Experts Platform which we are about to release. The concept of it is super simple. Experts giving signals to investors to buy or sell cryptocurrencies and being rewarded for good advice.

I think that simple products are the ones that really go viral, like Tinder or Snapchat, and we hope that this simple platform will be our gateway to embrace crypto investors.

Thank you Vitorino for the in-depth interview! Great to see that we have all kinds of different professional backgrounds at Auctus.

As a reminder we’ll be releasing our Beta at the end of the month and we’re looking for advisors to participate! We’ll be writing a post specifically about this and how you can sign up for a chance to participate.