Welcoming David Conroy to the Team

Meridio has been growing rapidly as we prepare for our private beta release. The original five person team has now more than tripled, and we have hired incredible candidates with a variety of talents to help get our platform live quickly and securely. This piece will be the first of many employee spotlights, highlighting the skill sets of team members new and old to provide transparency to our followers.

We are thrilled to announce David Conroy will be joining Meridio as our new Technical Lead, responsible for engineering management and overall technical architecture and scalability. David is an experienced research and development engineer with a strong background in blockchain technologies and a demonstrated history of innovation in the real estate industry. Working as a software engineer for 15 years, David spent six years as the Director of Information Technology at the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, before joining the National Association of Realtors as a R&D Lab Engineer. After becoming interested in blockchain technology in 2013, David began learning and writing about Bitcoin in his free time.

David decided to join Meridio because he believes the industry is ready to see projects move from pilot to production. He believes that blockchain technology will transform the real estate industry by introducing efficient solutions through a single source of truth in real estate data. Although David’s prior work has been focused around Hyperledger, he is now shifting his focus towards Ethereum because he has seen an explosion of open source development in the ecosystem, in addition to fantastic development tools. At Meridio, he sees a unique opportunity to not only introduce a new business model to an established industry, but also to level the playing field for participation.

Working for a research group called CRT Labs at NAR, David helped build a Hyperledger Fabric-based system to improve and shed light on how the association interacts with its 1.3 million members at 1400 local associations nationwide. Legacy systems lack the functionality to provide a complete, accurate, and verifiable report that shows the complete picture of a members activity within the association. With new blockchain based systems that granularity of reporting can be provided. This data can then be used to better provide services, aid in leadership development, and allow for increased recognition of our highly involved members. David realized this was only scratching the surface of blockchain use cases, and he explains, “This is due to the massive implications that blockchain poses for the real estate industry. In addition to payment and escrow, blockchains could potentially provide the mechanisms for establishing identity, enforcing of contracts, allowing for fractional ownership, and improving the overall quality of property records.”

In addition to the work David has done at NAR, he also entered multiple blockchain-related programming competitions to keep current on latest development trends. Most recently, he was a part of a team that took first place in IBM’s Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Global Hackathon. Alongside the prize, the top finish came with a opportunity to present at IBM’s Think 2018 Conference. The submission was a Hyperledger-based, IBM Watson-powered parking reservation marketplace called The Spot Exchange. David also supports Blockchain for social good. For the past few months, he has been working on a project that uses blockchain and artificial intelligence, providing identity, education, and family reunification services for Refugee Resettlement (visit ProjectSafeHarbor.com for more information). David also serves as co-chair of the two Chicago-based blockchain meetups, Hyperledger Chicago & Chicago Blockchain in Real Estate.

The Meridio team couldn’t be more excited to have David on board, his expertise will be a significant asset as we continue to grow the team and scale the application. His immediate focus will be managing our engineering team, owning the system design and implementation, and working to formalize and document overall production architecture and development flow. Moving forward David will play an integral role recruiting experts to fill various technical roles, running sprint planning sessions and prioritizing needs of the platform.

To learn more about David, visit his LinkedIn and Twitter. To learn more about Meridio check out our splash page, twitter, and medium. We have big announcements coming soon! Meridio is growing rapidly and we are constantly looking for new talent, click here to see our current open positions.