Ethan Frey

Ethan Frey is Head of Confio Labs, Founder at CosmWasm.

Coming from many years of experience building websites and APIs (with a focus on the backend), I was introduced to the post-bitcoin blockchain world in 2014 through ethereum and monax (formerly known as eris). I finally saw the potential of blockchain technology go beyond crypto-gold to provide a fully distributed security mechanism to any general purpose, deterministic state machine.

Since then, I have searched for a way to bring all the tooling I enjoy from developing with web technologies (powerful data models, extensible APIs, quick UI dev, good test frameworks) into a blockchain application. And in this search I discovered tendermint. It seemed to me a great design to make a split between the consensus logic and the application state, providing both flexibility of app development and security of the underlying consensus mechanism.

I am now starting to work with the tendermint team and also look forward to producing and open-sourcing a number of apps based on this technology to demonstrate the power of blockchain tech in numerous fields - anywhere where security and auditability are requirements.

I see the potential of these next-gen blockchain applications to democratize the concept of trust away from only enormous institutions (like banks and the government) to any sufficiently large group made of of "mostly trustable" people. My hope is eventually this could lead to a fundamental democratization of governance, finance, public records, and more.