Matt leads our engineering team as One Daijo’s Principal Engineer. We call him ‘the beast’ for the amount of work that he can churn out in a short period of time in superb quality. I am also inspired by his management skills — his ability to delegate effectively and provide honest and constructive feedback to his colleagues. Matt is that super down-to-earth friend who always makes you feel at ease.

Matt Rice — aka ‘the beast’

Cynthia: Hi Matt, could you tell us about your background and what you do at One Daijo?

Matt: I’m an Electrical Engineer by training, but I was never too interested in the power side of things, so I spent most of my time focusing on control theory, signal processing, and computer architecture. I found a controls professor that was willing to let me do research under him, and I stumbled upon a project to work on a distributed version of something called the Hungarian algorithm. We were basically trying to make groups of robots make good decisions together when they all had different sets of information. After I finished school, I went to work for a high-frequency hedge fund in Boston. We all wore a lot of different hats, but more than most, I became a generalist. I learned a lot about production development in C++ as well as pragmatic approaches to solving research problems in the commercial space. After about 2 years, I left finance to work for Google on an open source proxy because I’ve always been interested in learning more about low-level networking. I’ve been lucky to have been constantly surrounded by gifted and intellectually generous people who were willing to impart their knowledge on me. One Daijo is a perfect combination of my previous experiences. I get to work on blockchain-based decentralized networks and build financial technology. At One Daijo, I work on smart contracts, system architecture, and coordinating engineering efforts. Most of my work at One Daijo has been trying to design a system that is truly fair and rife with competition — the loan ecosystem and QIN token mechanism in particular. With respect to our code, one of my biggest concerns is always “how can someone exploit this?” So I’ve spent much of my time thinking about how our smart contracts and our system in general could be exploited by a bad actor and what we can do to protect our system against such threats.

Cynthia: Of all the blockchain projects out there, why One Daijo?

Matt: I chose One Daijo for three key reasons. The first is its core aim to better serve consumers by giving more of them access to a larger competitive space of service providers — democratizing loans. The second reason is One Daijo combines three of my biggest interests — finance, technology, and incentive structures. Last but not least, One Daijo has a team of truly talented and passionate individuals, so it was the perfect group with which to enter the crypto space.

Cynthia: In what ways does One Daijo’s engineering work stand out? What kinds of software engineering principles is One Daijo implementing?

Matt: One Daijo applies the user-first engineering philosophy. There are two aspects to this. We want to ensure that the user can interact with our system easily. We want to essentially wash away the technical details that are familiar only to blockchain enthusiasts. However, we also want to ensure that the users always have control of their own wallet, and we want to hold as little user data as possible. Because there have been so many security concerns with blockchain companies in the past, we want to limit user exposure to our security risks at all costs. We focus on problems only when we see an ultimate benefit to our end users. I think our two biggest software engineering principles are test everything and decentralize everything. We spend more time testing our code than implementing it. We take the cryptocurrency promise of financial decentralization very seriously. Our design work always starts with the question of whether a particular function could be performed by many nodes of control rather than just one.

Cynthia: What is the most challenging thing about working on a blockchain project in your opinion?

Matt: Cryptocurrencies are a new phenomenon. The tooling and infrastructure is really cool, but still relatively immature when compared to languages and processes that have been mainstream for 20–30 years. Coming from a C++ background, the lack of visibility for testing and debugging can be frustratingly lacking at times. That being said, I really appreciate all the work that open source developers have put into this infrastructure to make it as good as it is in just a few years.

Cynthia: How should projects determine which chain they should build on and whether they should use public or private chain?

Matt: There are too many chains to enumerate which is best for what purpose, but I generally prefer the philosophy of searching from most adopted to least adopted to find one that implements the base functionality necessary for your project to operate. As for a public or private chain, I think the determination comes down to how much control your project needs over the chain infrastructure and operation. Most projects are relatively content with the guarantees given by today’s most popular chains. Popular chains have consistent APIs, fast and efficient transaction processing, and a relatively low risk of having their consensus protocols broken by bad actors. However, some groups want the ability to rollback fraudulent transactions, make unilateral decisions about core chain code, etc.

Cynthia: What are your thoughts on various chains out there and why does Ethereum make the most sense for One Daijo currently?

Matt: The chain ecosystem is pretty diverse. Smart contracts are becoming more widespread — including on BTC. Since we want our system to be as trustless as possible with a relatively sophisticated smart contract functionality, we have chosen to use Ethereum. Its smart contract language and tooling is the most mature and sophisticated, by far. Due to its wide use, its VM is the most vetted smart contract platform in existence. Ethereum, at the moment, is the obvious choice for hosting our loans and token, but we are open to moving our platform to a different chain or making the platform cross-chain if changes in the crypto system make it advantageous for our users.

Cynthia: What advancements in this space are you most excited about?

Matt: I’m excited about three particular areas of advancement across the crypto space. The first would be efforts in keeping the systems just as decentralized, but making it more scalable both in terms of transaction speed and cost. The second is an effort to make cryptocurrencies more usable by establishing a larger retail presence in the crypto world. The third may be a prerequisite for the second, but I would like to see cryptocurrencies that either represent or are tied to existing fiat currencies in order to have cryptocurrencies that are stable enough for widespread retail use (it would also be nice to see other assets like real estate represented on chain).

Cynthia: What advice do you have for aspiring blockchain/smart contracts engineers?

Matt: It’s a new field, so it doesn’t take long to catch up with the “experienced developers”. Further, this is a space where there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of potential projects. All this is to say that right now is the time to get in, so read up, think, and build something.

Cynthia: What topics, other than blockchain and cryptocurrency, get you going?

Matt: Music. Music is the only thing I’ve been interested in longer than technology. I’ve spent (or wasted :)) days thinking about particular songs that are really meaningful to me, and I’ve learned to play a few instruments (not very well) over the years. I can’t quite describe why that medium is the one that I find the most appealing, but it’s always been something that excites me.

Matt showing off his guitar skills!

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