In the Metronome Minute, we ask members of the Metronome team five questions about their role, expertise, and what interests them about the project.

Gustav Simonsson — Orchid Protocol, Ethereum

This Metronome Minute features Metronome’s advisor and smart contract auditor: Gustav Simonsson.

Gustav is a Co-founder of Orchid Labs , a project building a decentralized internet protocol free from surveillance, and Gustav is also a former core developer at the Ethereum project.

Gustav, what is your role as a Metronome advisor?

As an advisor to Metronome I’ve helped the team with protocol R&D focusing on security, in particular the parts of Metronome implemented on Ethereum. Getting it right on Ethereum is important since this is the chain that Metronome will first be issued on, and where the Initial Supply Auction will take place. These contracts will be what others look at when developing new contract sets for new chains.

What excites you most about Metronome?

Metronome has bold ambitions and that’s what excites me the most about it; daring to create a long-term, sustainable cryptocurrency that works across multiple blockchains is ambitious, and a thrilling collaboration opportunity. Few cryptocurrencies have real focus on self-governance and portability, and there is a huge market demand for innovation in currency protocols.

I’m also excited about the fairness of the launch. Unlike recent ICO trends, Metronome is open to the public in a truly permissionless way. There is no presale or private sale. The lack of this sort of exclusive opportunity brings the community back to how cryptocurrencies were originally issued. Metronome is creating an equal playing field for anyone interested in participating.

What do you think have been the greatest challenges in bringing this cryptocurrency to life?

One of the hardest challenges with Metronome is ensuring it is 100% secure, both in terms of protocol correctness and supporting tools such as wallets. Securing smart contracts is a non-trivial effort, and the Metronome team has pushed through multiple iterations of security audits and protocol designs.

Unlike most ERC20 tokens that provide only speculation on potential future utility of unreleased apps and systems, Metronome is a complete currency at launch, backed by autonomous auctions where the Ether proceeds are exclusively held by a smart contract — not by the Metronome team! The autonomous converter contract is fully decentralized and gives community members a way to audit and reason about the crypto-economic backing of Metronome. Securely implementing the Metronome smart contracts for the auctions and the autonomous market maker was a real challenge for the team as the tools for building Ethereum smart contracts are still in an early stage and there is very little precedent in this space on how to securely implement advanced cryptocurrency designs. We hope the resulting open source code can come to good use for other projects.

What do you hope will be the most-used application of Metronome?

As a pure cryptocurrency, the application of Metronome I’m most excited about is improving value transfers and liquidity in the overall crypto ecosystem. Over the long-term, Metronome can satisfy global demand for value transfers and store of value.

Where will you be when the auction starts?

When the auction starts I will carefully observe the price at which traders jump on it — though I will not tell you what price I’m targeting!

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The Metronome team is justifiably proud of its advisors’ calibre. Its stellar spread of talent and expertise in its advisory board mesh, meld, and guide the core team to bring this new cryptocurrency to life.

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More to come,

The Metronome Team