Vedran Kajic holds a PhD and attended Cardiff University UK. Research interests include blockchain technology and artificial intelligence and is the author of the first decentralized strategy game, Etherization.
To learn more about Vedran’s latest project check out: https://www.cryptotask.org/
How did you get started with cryptocurrency?
I read an article in IEEE on Bitcoin in 2012 and I was blown away by the idea. I was immediately attracted by the decentralization as I knew any centralized platform can be shut down by the government. The way of solving Byzantine generals problem struck me as technically beautiful. I also looked at the historic price chart and noticed BTC has already survived early bubbles. So I knew the code was robust.
Who do you admire most in the industry and why?
Roger Ver, I love people who do things with conviction and are motivated by common good. It makes me very sad to see how some people in the community got blinded by the greed, and are making personal attacks on some people who have contributed the most from the early days. Luckily, there are many other exciting blockchain projects apart from Bitcoin out there.
What projects are you currently working on?
I am working on CryptoTask, a decentralized freelancing market with built-in scalable dispute mechanism. The main theme is decentralized freelancing, but it is actually more than that. It is about voting in a scalable way, which is also related to prediction markets such as Augur and Gnosis.
For example, if there are more tasks in dispute, or with predictions markets, more events to be voted on, how voters are selected is a crucial issue. For example, if everyone is able to vote on everything, such systems suffer from poor scalability. It would be like having only supreme court in the traditional legal system.
We solve that by introducing review panels that are randomly selected for each task in dispute. Nice thing about disputes, and why it is scalable, is that every stakeholder checks off-chain whether they were selected (signing with their private key and checking selection based on their stake), if so then they vote (commitVote), and later only prove on-chain that they were indeed selected (revealVote, more in the whitepaper). This is really unique.
Freelancing markets such as Ethlance have no dispute mechanism at all (and dispute mechanism is at the heart of a freelancing market), while predictions markets such as Gnosis and Augur are still struggling with scalability.
How do you see your business growing?
Our platform is already live on Ethereum main-net (smart contract with verified source code: https://etherscan.io/address/0x7f6eac2ea38284645795996b11f9bf227cf9551d), and some high value tasks have already been posted and completed.
We will be working on growing the user base, and also focusing on partnerships with traditional centralized freelancing markets. We will be monitoring gas prices on Ethereum blockchain, and if needed, move to a separate blockchain. Also, we are working on decentralizing data storage (i.e. when posting large data such as photos or videos as part of the task description or solution).
What motivates you to push forward every day?
Sometimes it is hard, for example there are so many ICOs that don’t even make sense, like projects with centralized point of failure or teams that even have no programmers. All this makes getting media attention much harder of course, as people are overloaded. However, I believe long term working on a quality project makes sense. It is challenging but there is a certain satisfaction from knowing you did your best.
