Theta Labs is proud to announce the creation of our Blockchain Advisory Council (BAC), which will be led by its first member Steve Dakh.

Steve was an original developer on the Ethereum project, co-founder and CTO of the KryptoKit team which launched the Rushwallet, and serves as an advisor to numerous blockchain projects such as Aeternity, Po.et, and Polymath. His current project is his most sophisticated wallet project yet, SmartWallet.

When Steve first started working with Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum team in January 2014, it was hard for him to imagine how far the blockchain space would have come since then. While great strides have been made, there are now 1,000s of blockchain projects in development, many of which have questionable use cases.

“I became interested in the Theta Network project after reading the white paper, which led to my first conversations with Mitch (Liu, CEO Theta Labs). What stood out to me was that Theta is solving a real problem that they encountered while building SLIVER.tv — how to deliver streaming video in areas where traditional content delivery networks can’t. There’s a real world use case for the Theta Token.” — Steve Dakh

On the Theta BAC, Steve will bring his extensive development experience to help as Jieyi (Theta Labs CTO) and the Theta team develop our native blockchain. The Theta blockchain team has been working with Steve on implementing the incentive mechanisms in the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Staking rewards need to be sufficient to encourage users to participate in the network as caching nodes, but not so high as to cause unwanted inflation in the ecosystem. At the same time, there needs to be a mechanism to discourage attackers from gaming the system, such as the “slasher” mechanism used in Tendermint and Casper. Steve’s advice has already been invaluable, and as we build the wallet client for Theta Token we’ll be working with the best in the business!

“There’s a great opportunity for Theta to improve on the existing CDN infrastructure by decentralizing streaming video delivery, and the Theta team has the experience in the streaming video space to accomplish that. Theta Token can be the incentive mechanism that will lead users to share their bandwidth and power the network.” — Steve Dakh “Steve was an early contributor in the blockchain space and has continued to innovate since then. He’ll be a valued addition to our Blockchain Advisory Council and we’re excited to work with him as we develop the native Theta blockchain and beyond.” — Mitch Liu, CEO Theta Labs

Welcome to the Theta project, Steve! And stay tuned as we announce the next members of the Blockchain Advisory Council soon.

The Theta Team