“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
With 3 out of 7 protocols launched and many lessons learned, we reviewed our performance over the last 1.5 years and came to several conclusions:
- Due to our ambitious ecosystem design and desire to build novel systems over simply deploying forks of other protocols, we needed more A-level talent. To create new use cases on our path to becoming an institutional-grade ecosystem, we needed more review of protocol logic, more experienced smart contract developers, and academic-level documentation.
- We needed to refine our release process to grant the community the opportunity to experiment with our products, free of charge, before they are launched on Flare’s Songbird Canary Network. Education is key, especially when dealing with a rapidly emerging field like blockchain technology.
In an attempt to rectify our first observation, over the last eight months, we conducted over 180 interviews with developers from all around the globe. Luckily, we were able to find an amazing Junior Developer but had a hard time locating the rare industry talents that we were looking for.
However, thanks to the bear market, we were able to do just that. Without any further ado, we are happy to introduce the beginning of what we hope will become a large team of academically focused scientists and engineers, FFLabs. Their primary purpose is to help the core team develop, test, audit, and release the four remaining protocols. But they have also contributed some ideas of their own, which will be implemented into our ecosystem.
Please Welcome:
Dr. Dionysis Zindros (https://dionyziz.com/w/)
Post-Doctoral Blockchain Researcher at Stanford
Dionysis is a post-doctoral blockchain researcher at Stanford University.
He holds a PhD from the University of Athens and an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from the National Technical University of Athens.
He specializes in blockchain scalability via light clients and fast bootstrapping. Among other venues he has published in IEEE S&P (Oakland), ACM CCS, ESORICS, and Financial Crypto, and presented at Black Hat Europe and Asia. Highlights of his research include the papers Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake Sidechains, and Proof-of-Work Sidechains.
Dr. Zeta Avarikioti
Post-Doctoral Blockchain Researcher at IST
Zeta is an upcoming Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien) in Austria. She is currently a post-doctoral blockchain researcher at TU Wien working with professor Matteo Maffei. She graduated with a PhD from ETH Zürich and holds an engineering degree from the National Technical University of Athens and a masters degree from National Kapodistian University of Athens.
She specializes in distributed systems, scaling blockchains via sharding and channels, and the analysis of cryptoeconomic incentives. Among other venues, she has published in Financial Crypto and SODA. Highlights of her research include the papers BRICK: Asynchronous Payment Channels, Cerberus Channels: Incentivizing Watchtowers for Bitcoin, and Divide and Scale: Formalization of Distributed Ledger Sharding Protocols.
Dr. Dimitris Karakostas
Post-Doctoral Blockchain Researcher at UE
Dimitris is a post-doctoral blockchain researcher at the University of Edinburgh where he works with professor Aggelos Kiayias. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from the National Technical University of Athens. He specializes in cryptocurrency wallets and macroeconomics, as well as chain checkpointing. Among other venues, he has published in Financial Crypto and presented at Black Hat Europe and Asia. Highlights of his research include the papers A Formal Treatment of Hardware Wallets, Cryptocurrency Egalitarianism: A Quantitative Approach, and Securing Proof-of-Work Ledgers via Checkpointing.
Stavros Korokithakis
Software Engineer & Computer Scientist
Stavros is a software developer based in Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering from the Technical University of Crete. He has been programming for twenty-five years with a focus on designing, developing, scaling, and maintaining web backends as well as on systems and data security. Stavros has worked in various sectors such as security, developing Silent Phone alongside Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas, in healthcare, and developing the Internet Computer at DFINITY.
Themis Papameletiou
Software Engineer & Computer Scientist
Themis is a software engineer based in Athens. He has significant experience developing software for a variety of projects such as web applications, algorithmic traders, and rockets. He is pursuing a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and has also completed internships at Google and at the European Space Agency. Currently, he is focused on smart contract development and testing.
Dimitris Lamprinos
Software Engineer & Computer Scientist
Dimitris is a software engineer based in Thessaloniki. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He works on smart contract development and basic consensus development. He has significant experience in developing and scaling web applications as well as blockchain development in the context of algorithmic trading. In the past, he has worked for Amondo and Geekbot.
If you are interested in joining this group, please reach out with a qualified resume to one of the moderators in our Discord server or on Telegram to get in contact.
With our nodes up and running on the new Coston Testnet, we are now following a strict development process. All new products will first be released on Coston to be available for free usage and experimentation for anyone interested in learning, risk free. After some time on Coston, each product will be connected to the live Experimental Finance platform on the Songbird Network. This launch will include integrations with the APY Cloud, to test fee accumulation across different pairs, and with partner protocol or network tokens (XDC, CSC, LGCY), where applicable. Finally, after thorough testing on the Songbird network, the product will be deployed to FLR Finance’s Mainnet ecosystem on the Flare Network.
We are currently beginning this development process with the release of FLRDrops on Coston. If you would like to participate, you can find a Coston setup guide here (https://medium.com/@flrfinance/flrdrops-primer-7c26ca1fa96d) and then come join us in the FLRDrops Coston Alpha (https://coston.drops.flr.finance/)!
