brainbot technologies -

A Blockchain Development Studio

Heiko Hees, founder of brainbot technologies

tl;dr: We are looking for new team mates to work with us on cool blockchain stuff.

I started working on Ethereum core development in early 2014 — mainly out of curiosity about blockchains, their technology and application areas. Back then, there was no certainty that Turing-complete blockchains would actually work at all and I didn’t expect that spending my time on this open source project would ever turn out to be useful in a business context.

Fast forward three years. The Ethereum stack has become the first choice of developers in a currently $100B valued blockchain ecosystem. While the Ethereum community is building an ever-growing ecosystem of interoperable applications, the technology has caught the attention of businesses from various industries around the globe. Tokenization of all kinds of assets on permissionless decentralized ledgers is a fast growing trend with the blessing of a growing number of jurisdictions.

At the same time, brainbot technologies has become a fast growing team of experts working on a set of quite exciting projects. We’re now considered as one of the few organizations which actually have a truly deep understanding of blockchain technology, as well as the surrounding ecosystem and our advice is requested from big enterprises, regulators and especially other blockchain startups.

But what are we actually doing, how is life at brainbot technologies?

Enabling Blockchain Adoption

Our main focus is projects that we consider to be core building blocks necessary to support broad adoption of public blockchain systems. While interest in blockchains soared recently, this is still the very beginning and the technology must mature to support significant adoption, mainly in the dimensions of scalability and accessibility.

Some Projects we are working on

The Raiden Network: Scaling Token Transfer Capacity

The transfer of Tokens (aka payments) is one of the early killer applications of blockchain systems. Unfortunately, traditional blockchains have severe limitations regarding the number of transactions they can support per block. Therefore, they are not fit to support global adoption of blockchain-based payments and the upcoming wave of tokenization. The Raiden Network solves this issue by using a network of off-chain state channels to securely transfer any ERC20 token without the requirement to transact on the blockchain. The technology scales out linearly with the number of participants and improves privacy and latency issues at the same time.

Therefore the Raiden Network has the potential to become the backbone for token transfers globally. We are releasing a developer preview soon™.

RaidEX: Fast, Scalable, Provably Fair, Decentralized Token Exchange

Next to transfer of tokens, their exchange is probably the second most used functionality of blockchains. Unfortunately, most current crypto exchanges are centralized, too many of them got hacked and lost the tokens of their clients. Being closed, centralized marketplaces, they cannot prove that they are not front running their clients. One alternative is blockchain-based decentralized exchanges (DEX), but these are slow, don’t scale and have rather high fees. The RaidEX project aims to solve these issues by using state channel technology to allow for fast, provably fair and scalable decentralized exchange of tokens without relying on a centralized entity. Our plan with RaidEX is no less than to set new standards for secure, transparent and performant decentralized exchanges and help to restore trust in crypto exchanges.

The Trustlines Network: The Original Ripple Idea Built on Ethereum

Another big roadblock on the way toward broad adoption is the kind of money we currently have on the blockchain. It’s mostly mined or premined and average Joe can only acquire it by buying it with fiat money, requiring a bank account and again involving centralized exchanges. Getting into crypto currently relies on the incumbent financial infrastructure, which blockchains were actually supposed to be an alternative to. Closing this gap is necessary to complete the vision of a truly decentralized economic infrastructure.

The Trustlines Network implements our vision of decentralized money as it should be. It defines money as IOUs based on individual trust relationships, thus giving fair access to money to everyone with a friend. Payments are routed along a path of trusting peers on the social graph. This allows anyone to join the Ethereum ecosystem without having to acquire ETH with fiat money. Barriers of adoption are significantly lowered which allows for an influx of millions of new users who find the current process of acquiring crypto too cumbersome or don’t have access to traditional financing infrastructure in the first place. And it’s amazingly simple! Learn more at the website, check out our Trustlines prototype and join our Slack to become part of the people powered money movement.

Ethereum: Core Development

In the past we’ve also significantly contributed to the development of the Python implementation of the Ethereum protocol. We’ve also built a private chain extension of it called Hydrachain which added permissioning and PBFT consensus as options. We are happy to see the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance advancing these developments. And as one of their founding members and tech advisors, we are looking forward to revive our core development activities in the near future and help with important protocol updates like proof-of-stake and sharding.

Scouting for Opportunities

Currently, new blockchain-based projects are springing up like mushrooms after the rain and seemingly every large company looks into this exciting technology. Unfortunately, most ideas are pointless as they fail to leverage blockchains to actually reduce friction introduced by trust issues. But some are real gems and for such projects we offer our full range of services if we manage to agree on a long term partnership with the right incentives. Peer-to-peer energy trading is one such project and we are happy to support the Energy Web Foundation and their mission to lower the barriers of entry in energy markets.

And, surprise…

We are Hiring

Currently, we are ramping up the development capacity for all our projects and thus are looking for highly talented developers who are excited about blockchain technology.

It’s no requirement to be a blockchain expert already though. If you are smart, your new colleagues can bring you up to speed on blockchain tech within a few weeks. While it might be quite challenging to wrap your head around the nature of distributed systems and the involved game theory, it’s mostly solid engineering.

You can find a list of open positions here: https://angel.co/brainbot-technologies/jobs

Growing teams also require some management and therefore we are also looking for proven project managers with a strong software engineering background.

Also if you happen to be the unicorn who is able to understand complex technology and translate it to a layman audience, please apply for the position of our head of marketing.

Meet the Team

We’ve grown quite a lot in size over the last two years and gained diversity of various cultural backgrounds and skill sets. Yet we still share common values as a group: We are wholehearted blockchain tech enthusiasts with low tolerance for bullshit or drama, we endorse proactivity and taking responsibility, we are committed to open source, open protocols and public chains. Most importantly, we think that work should not only be challenging and come with the right monetary incentives, but also fun and a social thing. We are headquartered in Germany, but our team is spread from India through Europe and all the way to Brazil. Therefore we make sure that the entire team gets together at a nice location a couple of times a year. When we do so, we discuss the latest developments in the Ethereum space as well as having technical sessions about the things we’re building. At the same time, we enjoy each other’s company, have good food and a cold beer, while exchanging ideas on all sorts of interesting topics. This mixture is what we believe makes brainbot a great place to work and grow as a professional, but also as a human being.

Join us on our Mission

Today, Ethereum stands out in the world as an extremely innovative, inspiring, hard working, global community and we are proud to be part of it. But as said earlier, we are at still at the very beginning of this nascent ecosystem and a lot remains to be researched and developed to support our mission to enable widespread adoption of public blockchain technology.

If you are similarly excited about the future of blockchains, consider to join us and become part of this amazing, open ecosystem at the technological frontier!

Cheers,

Heiko