At first, Opus was nothing more than the vision to give music back to the artist. Our founders recognized that music streaming platforms already available on the market treat musicians unfairly, and they realized that the solution to this problem lies in the blockchain. After over a year of meticulous planning, our ICO was wildly successful thanks to the support from our amazing community. We managed to be featured in media outlets worldwide, among others Forbes, Business Insider, and The Huffington Post; and raised a whopping 5 million dollars in Ethereum.

Our next step is to keep our promises. Our team decided that the best course of action was to move the development of the platform to Gdansk, Poland, because of the vast network our team has already established and the amount of highly skilled developers based there.

During our move, we have also been recruiting artists to join us at Opus, and we have had an amazing response from musicians in a wide range of genres from all over the globe. We have already announced twelve artists whose music you will be able to enjoy on the Opus platform, and we plan to announce more in the coming days.

Now, development is going ahead at full steam with a new CTO at its head and a team of talented developers directing all their efforts into delivering the platform the way we envisioned it at the very beginning. This is a fresh chapter for Opus. We have a new team and a new base, and we have reflected on any shortcomings we may have had until now and fixed them. Our whole team is incredibly excited to finish this year off on a good note and go into the next year with a clear goal and the means to reach it.

Our team

Konrad Szałapak

Konrad is our new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). With over 20 years’ of experience in FinTech ventures and programming, business management, and algotrading, Konrad is very capable of taking the reins in developing the Opus platform.

He started his first business as a Linux sysadmin before become a software developer at Poland’s first web portal, Wirtualna Polska. He has since become an independent entrepreneur, with his impressive project portfolio including Ethereum platform ICO and trading algos development, the creation of a hedge fund for BZWBK (The Santander Group) in Luxembourg, and corporate level software development projects for telecoms, integrators, government, e-commerce, and renewable energy.

Over the past 7 years, Konrad has cofounded and run a variety of tech startups where he focused on business growth and programming of software systems. His leadership resulted in one of his startups being funded by a VC, another being chosen to participate in the Starter Rocket Acceleration Programme, and two others now selling licenses for their developed products, which have become profitable assets.

Outside of work, Konrad enjoys outdoor activities, such as long distance running and trekking. He is focused on personal development with meditation, perseverance, and a creative mind. His entrepreneurial soul and passion for the blockchain make Konrad perfectly suited to lead the development of the Opus platform.

Tomasz Szafran

Tomasz is an Android developer with five years’ experience in the field. Over the course of his career, Tomasz has created a vast number of apps, ranging from small, simple apps to large, complicated apps requiring a high level of skill and a years of development.

His biggest projects to date were Yappie, with 200,000 users at its peak, and PerfectPint. Tomasz has also been part of teams developing mobile apps for large banks, and a variety of apps that are not accessible by the general public. One such project is a collection of apps with similar functioning tailored to suit the needs of various clients which, combined with an external device connected to vehicles, is used to manage large fleets of vehicles. This project tracks the vehicles and, using Bluetooth, collects data from the cars and sends them to a server. Aside from these large projects, Tomasz has also created many smaller apps, such as iBetForFun or Dermaveel.

When he’s not working, Tomasz loves listening to music, with his day usually starting with a hot cup of coffee and the radio tuned into his favorite station. Tomasz is also a keen reader. He cites his genre of choice lately to be Polish fantasy, and he frequently reads novels to end his day on a good note.

Tomasz is an excellent addition to our team. His experience and passion will ensure that the work he puts in will be of the highest quality, and we are all excited to work with him in delivering the Opus platform.

Mateusz Gruszka

Mateusz is a computer science student whose drive to learn has brought him to Opus. He is passionate about developing mobile apps, primarily for iOS, a skill which will be very useful in the development process. His area of expertise is programming using Swift and Java. He has completed a comprehensive course in Java and Android, organized by the Software Development Academy and supervised by professional developers with years of experience.

Mateusz will be helping in the development of the platform while we continue searching for a lead developer with more experience in developing iOS apps. We hope to be able to give Mateusz the opportunity of learning on the job and gaining more experience. In the meantime, we encourage any members of our community who would be interested in becoming our lead iOS developer to get in touch with us at info@opus-foundation.org or via Telegram or Discord.

Mateusz will have a variety of tasks besides helping with developing the iOS app; he is also adept at UX and will work on our trademark designs, and he will also be testing the platform at every stage of development in order to reduce the number of bugs and ensure that the final product will be flawless.

In his free time, Mateusz enjoys trying his hand at tasks revolving around Augmented Reality and Machine Learning. With his innovative mindset, Mateusz is sure to fit in perfectly at Opus.

Computers are not the only thing Mateusz is interested in; he is also an avid music fan who does not restrict himself to one specific genre, but rather enjoys listening to anything from American and London-based rap, to jazz and movie soundtracks.

We are very fortunate to have Mateusz on board with us. His energy and motivation align perfectly with what we are looking for in our team members, and we look forward to be working with him.

Philipp Siemek

We have already introduced Philipp in a previous update; however, we would like to use this opportunity to say a few more words about him. Our community manager joined us in September, after the ICO, and has since been busy updating the Opus community on what is going on and recruiting artists.

During his time at Opus, Philipp has successfully kept the community in the loop with what is going on and recruited a large number of artists, twelve of whom have already been announced.

We love having Philipp on board with us and are happy to continue working with him in this next chapter.

Core team

It goes without saying, of course, that our core team consisting of Bokang Jia, Chenhao Xu, and Mateusz Mach, is still very much engaged in Opus. They have worked hard to make their vision a reality, and they look forward to this new chapter as much as everyone else. Their input has been instrumental in revolutionizing the music streaming industry, and the rest of the team is excited at the prospect of continuing to work closely with them.

Our office

With a prime location in Gdansk and within the local startup and tech scene, the Opus office is where the magic will happen. This is where the bulk of the development is going on. Located in the Starter incubator, our team will be able to be part of a larger community by sharing various amenities, but will also enjoy the benefits of privacy in our rented office space to focus on the development.

Property of Coworking Poland

At present, we are in the process of outfitting the office. Though desks and chairs have been provided, the setup still needs to be tailored to suit our needs and we will be sure to personalize it to create a relaxed but motivating environment. We will be sure to update you again when the office will be fully ready.

We have two neighboring rooms separated by a door, and access to conference rooms, a kitchen, a parking garage, and showers. The building is open 24/7, which means that our developers have flexible working hours and are not restricted to certain times.

Our plan

This is a new beginning for Opus and we won’t be heading into it without a clear plan. After extensive research on how best to approach a project of this magnitude, we have settled on Agile software development, wherein up-front planning and design is minimized in favor of working in shorter timeframes, or sprints. Our team is cross-functional, with all our team members having different areas of expertise.

This method has proven in the past to be highly efficient and will allow us to complete the Opus platform to the high standard we have set ourselves. We are ready to rapidly adapt to new situations and quickly respond to feedback regarding our efforts. Of course, we will also be using the past experiences of our team members to combine the best aspects of various other project management methods to ensure that our work will be swift and of the standard that our community has come to expect from us.

Typically, this kind of method does not include a detailed plan before the work starts, with specific dates and deadlines set in stone, as these usually turn out to be unpredictable and subject to change depending on the situation. In our next update, however, we will publish a framework for the development, with some of the milestones we hope to achieve along the way, so be sure to look out for that in our next blog post.

Updates

Now that the development has sped up, we will be publishing regular updates. For the first few weeks, we need some time to get used to our new office and to get more accustomed to this kind of work, so we will be releasing these updates every two weeks.

The development updates will feature some of the work we have completed already, and what we plan to do over the next few days and weeks. We will also look into providing these updates not only in the form of blog posts, but also perhaps short films summarizing the development process.

Aside from these regular updates, we will continue to announce more artists joining us at Opus, and we will also release updates not necessarily regarding the development, but also all other aspects of our work.

More to come soon…

Our whole team at Opus would like to use this opportunity to thank our truly incredible community for the continued support and faith in this project. Over these past few months, we have received a lot of suggestions of what we could do at Opus, some of which we tried out and found to be very effective (the online form for artists to sign up was suggested by our members of our community, for example), which is why we promise to engage the community more and hope to receive lots more ideas that we can turn into a reality.

More updates will be coming very soon, and we hope that you are just as excited about them as we are.

If you have any questions, suggestions, feedback, or anything else you would like us to know (including if you are interested in becoming our lead iOS developer), please don’t hesitate to drop us an email at info@opus-foundation.org or send a message on Discord or Telegram.

To be the first to learn about our updates, be sure to follow Opus on Facebook and Twitter!