Hey, Fluencers, how’s your summer?

Hope you had a great vacation somewhere warm. We’ve been pretty busy, though. Here’s what we did in the past two months:

But that is not all:

Our team got two new members: Alexey and Mikhail

And new advisors on board: Howard Wu and Simon Kozlov

Read on for the details!

“Building decentralized data infrastructure” with Evgeny at Dappcon

Evgeny shows a live web-client demo

Apart from having an opportunity to speak at one of the key industrial events, these talks provide a great deal of feedback, which helps us test product hypothesis, find new use cases, and those interested in incorporating Fluence.

Thanks to the Dappcon top organization, who also provided the video super fast:

Ethereum Magicians and the future of dapps

The discussion here is important not just to us, but to the whole community, so we figured the theme deserves it’s own blogpost.

Evgeny covers much of what’s up with Ehtereum and its current state, including the challenges and the future of dapps answering some tricky questions.

Polkadot & Fluence in Tallinn

Despite the location changed at the last moment, we’ve managed to gather everyone and had a great time.

Sharing scene with teams like Polkadot is always a responsibility (those guys are NASA in crypto), but it feels like we did great! Big thanks to Fabian for joining us.

more photos in our Facebook group

We’re excited to see that so many people in various places not only show great interest in decentralized technology but also have a deep understanding of what it is, includes which tech stack, and what problems could solve.

And we’re not the only ones, who think like this:

The baltic states have very active and knowledgeable blockchain communities, Estonia is no exception here. The great Meetup we had in Tallinn was a reflection of that.

— Fabian Gompf (Polkadot), thanks for making this meetup twice as awesome! Make sure to follow Fabian on twitter.

In case you’ve missed the event, we have a recording:

Dmitry in Minsk with a tech talk on decentralized infrastructure

Our CTO Dmitry rarely leaves his hideout choosing coding to public speaking, but when he does — oh boy! I hope one day his articles on functional programming and approach to distributed systems will appear on this blog. For now, you can watch his presentation (audio in Russian, but the slides are in English with subtitles available)

Team boot camp with a tech focus

While the football fans flooded the streets of Moscow and Evgeny spent most of his time in Berlin, we decided to go and see Kaliningrad — the west most of Russian cities. We didn’t get to see much though.

Most of the time the team had spent with the flip chart at the AirBnB flat. During this week we’ve managed to crystallize a solid roadmap for the prototype, review the code written so far and devise a strategy, how to split it into modules to use further in the system.

Finally, we now have a week-by-week plan for each team member that includes research and development and aligned with the roadmap. Expect more news on our tech development here really soon.

An addition to the team

It took quite a time to turn hiring into a process (conducting tech interviews could be convoluted and time costly, so we had to find a way to test the skills and find the right attitude quick) but the results paid off: two great engineers on the team.

Moving through the busy Moscow streets

Michael Voronov — Reverse engineer and system programmer with a strong knowledge of OS internals and process virtual machines architecture. Ex-captain of the CTF (cybersecurity contests) team, computer security Ph.D. candidate (exploit detection), interested in finding public products vulnerabilities (owns few CVEs).

Contemplating the sunset in Florence

Alex Pyshenko — Seasoned distributed systems engineer with a deep functional languages knowledge. Previously longtime key developer of the messenger platform oktos.io, where he implemented end-to-end encrypted communication and key management protocols; integrated Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets functionality.

Advice, there’s never too much

We’re proud to announce two great advisors joined us this month. Howard Wu — an expert software engineer himself and the founding partner of the Dekrypt Capital. Howard is an active contributor to an open source community and an author of a Java library for distributed zero-knowledge proof systems (DIZK)

He is also an advisor for the Berkeley Blockchain research lab. Howard’s knowledge and deep understanding of crypto field will help us drive our product strategy and marketing efforts.

Simon Kozlov is a machine learning and AI expert with a track record of building teams and technology at Silicon Valley startups and larger companies. Previously director of engineering at Roblox (currently valued at $2.4B) and engineer at Microsoft and Dropbox. Teaches Deep Learning in NSU, Russia’s top 5 science and engineering school. If you’re into machine learning, you should definitely check out his twitter.

These two months had been quite busy, but we’ve got even more plans till the end of the year, stay tuned!