Moonbeam founder Derek: Build a multi-chain future

Moonbeam Network

特邀专栏作者

2021-07-19 11:09

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Moonbeam founder Derek's entrepreneurial journey

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Moonbeam founder Derek's entrepreneurial journey

Derek Yoo

PureStake CEO

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Derek led the team to build Moonbeam Network, a Polkadot project based on Substrate and fully compatible with Ethereum. The description that sounds convoluted is an accurate summary of the project, and it is also the direction of Derek's efforts: to create a multi-chain future.

Unlike many young blockchain serial entrepreneurs, Derek is still a "newcomer" to the first project. However, before stepping into the blockchain, he has more than 10 years of successful Internet entrepreneurial experience and is an experienced "entrepreneurial veteran". Even though he is a "newcomer", Derek's blockchain project is still favored by many investors. How is this done?

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Accumulate entrepreneurial experience with 20 years

In the 1990s, the Internet was in a period of rapid rise, and various Web 2.0 applications blossomed everywhere like the current blockchain dApps. Today's Internet giants Amazon, Google, NetEase, etc. also started their "first year" in this era.

With his first successful work experience, Derek continued to jump to BladeLogic, and from the perspective of a product manager, he provided enterprise server configuration services and automated data solutions for many well-known companies.

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Derek Yoo (left) and Steven Kokinos (right)

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Image credit: Boston Business Journal

The successful entrepreneurial experience in the Web 2 field has made Derek more clear about his belief in business: to create real value for the industry.

However, when Fuze's business was booming, his business partner Steven proposed to resign, which made Derek puzzled and curious.

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Small gains in the blockchain

2016 was a bright period for the blockchain industry. Steven, an early partner, seized the opportunity to turn to the blockchain and founded the public chain project Algorand. The achievements of entrepreneurial partners in new fields made Derek curious about blockchain and cryptography. Relying on the technology development experience accumulated in the early stage, he started to learn blockchain technology.

After some research, Derek felt that the blockchain is too good, and this may be a direction of technological change. According to Derek's original words: "It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enter the field at an early stage and have a major impact on the world."

In the later stage, Algorand needs technical development support and API tools. As an early entrepreneurial partner, Derek established Purestake (the operating company of the blockchain project Moonbeam Network) to provide Algorand with various network development services, including developers commonly used development tools and API services.

The early Purestake main business was very focused, mainly providing developer tools and API services. Different from the business development strategy of "multi-line development" popular in the chain circle at that time, Derek's operation strategy seemed a little monotonous, but it made all the venture capital managers feel very "fresh". When I asked why I invested in Purestake, most of the replies I got were: the general direction is consistent, the team understands technology, and the CEO is hardworking and willing to do things.

Relying on his solid foundation in the Internet field in the early days, Derek quickly gained a foothold in the blockchain. Drawing on his experience in the cloud and SaaS industries, Derek runs nodes and API services for developers (such as Algorand's Infura), block explorers, and wallets on Algorand, effectively improving the efficiency of development operations and infrastructure.

Purestake's high-quality service has made the company famous in the developer circle, but at this time Derek is not satisfied with the role of "technology developer", he wants to be an underlying platform that can meet the needs of more users.

"For developers, when they choose to deploy on one chain, it means that they give up the ability to provide services for users and assets on other chains. For end users, they have to learn different underlying blockchains. Compared with the user experience of Web 2, the user experience of the current blockchain is very backward, and solving cross-chain interoperability is the key to solving these two problems."

Looking for answers with questions, Derek found that Cosmos SDK and Substrate are two suitable solutions for cross-chain communication. It is also very important to have a native contact layer. Polkadot came into his vision, and a new entrepreneurial project, Moonbeam Network, came into being.

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Entrepreneurship again is optimistic about multi-chain

Once Moonbeam was launched, it was favored by venture capital institutions in the industry, and at the same time received strong official support from Parity. It received Polkadot Grants funding in the early stage. This year, it was invited to participate in the Polkadot Bootamp training camp to accelerate its development in the Chinese market.

Becoming the helm of Moonbeam, Derek focuses on the development trend of multiple chains, starting with the development of Substrate, the underlying framework of Polkadot, adding full compatibility functions of Ethereum, and then developing commonly used Ethereum such as Metamask, Truffle, The Graph, and Chainlink Tools moved to Moonbeam. After more than a year of operation and development, Moonbeam's decentralized Lego world has begun to take shape.

There is a saying among developers in the Polkadot community that to develop on Polkadot, use Moonbeam’s development tools, just like Ethereum.

In one year, more than 150 projects have announced the deployment of Moonbeam (located in Polkadot) and Moonriver (located in Kusama), including well-known projects such as SushiSwap, The Graph, and Chainlink, as well as trendy NFT projects such as Zoombie and Seascape.

In the currency circle, a place that pursues "fastness", Derek has been recognized by the industry with his "slow work and careful work". Many people pay attention to Moonbeam not because of the price of MOVR or GLMR, but because of their heartfelt recognition of the technical advantages of Moonbeam .