Just before I joined Avalanche in May 2019, I was considering a shift back to my previous industry after 3 years working full time in crypto. When I first got involved with crypto and blockchain in general I did it because its ideology was well aligned with mine. It had the potential to be a real paradigm shift in finance inspiring freedom, equality, censorship resistance, immutability. After working 3 years in the industry having an inside backstage perspective I found out that we were in a rat race, this technology didnāt have the fundamentals to deliver on its promise the scalability was non-existent, the development of the fundamentals was extremely slow and it was going nowhere. Ethereum was stuck in a 4-year delay loop getting congested by crypto kitties, everything else that popped was basically a scam or just a combination of different tradeoffs(mostly sacrificing decentralization for performance), new lipstick on the good old pig no one was really innovating layer 1.
So all that really had me going and I was already looking into PM roles in any other industry, but crypto. After 4 stages of the interview (3 months), I was just invited to my final meeting with Bitfinex which I turned down respectfully because I was convinced Iām quitting this industry.
Thatās when a good friend told me about the Avalanche paper which according to him was super promising, a breakthrough in consensus, a real shot at the scalability trilemma, etc. After analyzing a ton of whitepapers and projects in the past years who always seemed to offer breakthroughs, but never delivered I must confess I was extremely skeptical, but out of respect to my friend and the boredness of browsing job ads I decided to give it a go. The first thing that caught my eye was that it was actually something new, it wasnāt the good old customized clone of X (if you happened to have read XX crypto whitepapers and then read the Avalanche paper, you will perfectly understand what I mean.) It didnāt talk about the Sybil protection mechanism because it wouldnāt really matter in the context of reaching consensus in a completely different fashion that made so much sense. Iāve decided to go the extra mile and find out more about the authors I couldnāt find much, but thatās when I found all the presentations from Emin GĆ¼n Sirer which filled all the gaps in my understanding. I was convinced that Avalanche had the serious potential of being the missing piece in the fundamentals. It promised scalability without sacrifice in decentralization or security as well as a vertically scaled performance with a really interesting infrastructure model that would allow it to spread horizontally on demand.
I offered my service and joined the team, the rest is history. The first time I sent a transaction on the network with 1200 validators and it was finalized in less than a second is a moment I will never forget because it was the moment I realized I was right to give the industry another chance. What happens from here on after is beyond my imagination, what matters is the tech with the fundamentals is here capable to serve any demand, flexible enough to serve virtually any use. The rest is a matter of time.
Sorry for the long post here is a heart-shaped potato!
