1️⃣ How did you get into the crypto sphere and what did you do before that?
I was studying computer science at Harvard in 2016 when I discovered Ethereum and started investing, mining and teaching myself Solidity. My senior year I raised money for my first crypto company, so professionally I have always worked in crypto.
2️⃣ Do you have any hobbies?
I used to surf daily before moving to NYC, now I like to spend time with friends and check out cool activities throughout the city like music shows and museums.
3️⃣ What is Omni Network in simple terms and what technologies does it bring to crypto?
In simple terms, Omni makes it so that developers can make their applications accessible to a wider audience of users. Scaling solutions (like rollups) are great because now more users can participate with lower transaction fees, but it hurts developers by limiting their addressable user base to only the users of the rollup that they deploy their app on. Omni changes this, we help developers expand their apps across all L2s (without fragmenting liquidity) so that they can access more users. In regards to the new technologies it brings to the table, it is the first cross rollup development platform that is secured through EigenLayer’s restaking — bringing a whole new level of security to the industry through leveraging frontier innovations.
4️⃣ Why did you decide to create this particular project?
We actually built a DeFi protocol called Rift Finance before building Omni. We started to take Rift multichain and it was incredibly difficult and fragmented our liquidity, so we started to build a solution for it and realized two things:
To do this properly it was going to be an incredibly big project and
if we did it well, that we would solve one of the biggest problems in the entire crypto infrastructure stack so we doubled down on this solution and Omni Network was the outcome.
5️⃣ Do you have any competitors?
I think most projects that utilize interoperability before us focused on making bridges — that is not where we are focused, we have a singular focus on making it as easy as possible to bring your apps across multiple rollups which I don’t see anybody else in the industry focusing on.
6️⃣ How strong is your team?
My co-founder and I both studied computer science at Harvard, our COO studied at Harvard Business School, and our engineering team is top notch. We’ve had a huge filter on anybody that applies because we prefer to work with a smaller team that consists exclusively of extremely talented individuals who are seeking strong autonomy and independence in their work as opposed to a larger team with more mediocre team members. That’s definitely not what I see most companies in the space doing, but we all prefer to work this way and I think it’s made us incredibly effective, and in addition to that it’s honestly just a pleasure to work with extremely competent people.
7️⃣ What do you value most about people and the community?
The number one rule of crypto is that you don’t focus on building your community you will not be able to create a successful project. It doesn’t matter how cool the tech is, if you aren’t able to build a thriving community of people supporting your project then you will fail. We acknowledge this deeply and it’s why you see us doing so much more with our community than other deep infrastructure companies.
8️⃣ There is a testnet launch going on right now, how do you rate it?
If I’m being honest we have absolutely blown away our targets. In Q2 our internal goal was to get 10k users on the network and we ended with 100k. It’s extremely exciting to see this many people from across the world passionate about what we’re building.
9️⃣ How many partners do you have right now? Will there be any new partners?
I believe we have 6 protocols deployed on testnet right now — a ton are in the pipeline. Honestly a lot of this has come from the simplicity of our product offering: more users.
🔟How do you see the Crypto sphere and the project in 3 years?
I think Omni will be one of the most important infrastructure layers in crypto in 3 years time. In addition I think crypto at large will continue to increment towards mainstream adoption in that time and I’m excited for the opportunity that Omni has to accelerate that through abstracting away the complexity of the current UX behind the scenes to make it approachable to a wider audience.
1️⃣1️⃣ Let's recap, and maybe you have some thoughts for the community? What can we expect in the coming months? Let's create some intrigue for the community!
We are extremely product focused right now. Even though our community has grown massively and we’ve seen a lot of partnership traction it’s actually only me and our COO working on BD, the rest of our team are engineers who are working hard everyday to expand Omni’s functionality. Over the coming months you’ll see us rolling out more features for Omni and productionizing it further to make it more resilient.
1️⃣2️⃣ What advice would you give to newcomers to Crypto?
Have patience — many people view crypto as a get rich quick opportunity. I’ve been building in crypto for over 6 years now and I’ll still be here building another 6 from now. You have to have a long term view with this, if you try to gamble and make money quick you’re more likely than not to lose it all. If you have patience though and align yourself with teams that are building infrastructure that be foundational to the entire crypto ecosystem then you will have a much better time in crypto.
About Omni
The Omni Network is a layer 1 blockchain built to connect all rollups. Using Omni, developers can build global applications that are available across all rollups. Secured through restaking $ETH, Omni is a next-generation blockchain leading the frontier in both security and functionality.
Omni is backed by $18M from prominent investors such as Pantera Capital, Two Sigma Ventures and Jump Crypto.
