In the Fall of 2018, I joined a small project called Hashgraph as a software developer. Over the next few months, we'd announced the public network was to be named Hedera and managed to secure the purchase of the hedera.com domain. A round of SAFT fundraising was closed with over $100M raised.
As the network launched on August 24th, 2018, engineers finally had the opportunity to build their applications on the network. I transitioned into my role as a Developer Evangelist for Hedera Hashgraph, participating in speaking engagements and making demos or tutorials to help educate the growing developer community looking to Hedera as a solution.
It's been an incredible ride, and I'm now ready for my next career move. I'm excited to share that I'll be joining NBA player and Entrepreneur Spencer Dinwiddie and an excellent team at Calaxy as Chief Technology Officer and one of their very first employees.
During my time at Hedera, I had the opportunity to work on the Daily Timestamp, the first Hedera mainnet production application ever deployed. It was an integral part of Hedera's Community Testing Program, which enabled anyone testing the network with micropayment transactions to earn hbars.
I helped over 30 projects build their applications on the Hedera network, built most of what is now hedera.com, and established various internal and external processes that helped turn Hedera into what it is today. I also started the developer tutorial series "Coding with Cooper," with over 8,000 views from developers looking to build on Hedera.
I was also fortunate enough to speak about Hedera and the industry at innovative universities, such as the University of California, Santa Barbara, Georgia State University, the University of Geneva, and the University of Athens, Greece, among other incredible events like Web3Summit and S.F. Blockchain week.
With my departure, there will be an opening for my previous role at Hedera as a Developer Evangelist. If you're interested in this unique opportunity, please reach out to Lina Tran.
Through the use of social tokens on Hedera Token Service, Calaxy aims to build the first true creator economy — providing an easy-to-use one-stop-shop for creators to engage with their communities. Whether it's paid video calls, drop-in audio, or custom services — such as virtual cooking classes — creators no longer have to manage their monetization across many different platforms.
As part of Calaxy's Creator Economy, there are Creator tokens for which we're leveraging Hedera. Any verified athlete, musician, artist, creator, or influencer can issue these fungible tokens and use them to interact and engage directly with their fans.
I'll be hiring an engineering team and managing migration from the Hedera Consensus Service to the new Hedera Token Service, in addition to establishing architectures, cryptoeconomic models, and open-source standards for our various types of tokenization. I couldn't be more excited about the future of social tokenization and tokenization on Hedera more generally.
It's been an incredible experience helping bootstrap, evangelize, and grow the adoption of Hedera. Although my new role will focus on building Calaxy, I certainly plan to continue sharing my excitement for Hedera publicly and discuss how we're using it to power the Calaxy application's tokenization, which we hope to scale to millions of users.
You can sign up for early access to Calaxy on our website.
P.S. If you want to help build the creator economy through social tokenization, please get in touch. I will be actively hiring engineers to help across our applications and infrastructure — no prior experience with Hedera Hashgraph, blockchains, or distributed ledgers necessary.