Hey guys, welcome again to another AMA with our community native. So we are waiting on our guest so we can get started with the AMA. So give us a few minutes.
>> Hi, Nikita. Welcome to the Uda Hara Community MA. I just sent you a co-hosting wife. Kindly accept so we can get you started.
Hey, what's up everyone? Can you guys hear me loud and clear?
Yes, Nikita, I can hear you right on clear. Everybody can hear you. I'm sure everybody can hear you right on clear as well. Thank you. Welcome onboard this email with Oda. Yes, so are we expecting any more person from your team before we get started?
Okay, sorry, let's get just started. So man, you've been really, really pushing out a couple of good products. You had the ones behind so this finance now you're pushing out all that as well.
So before we get started, can you for the community, I know what you've done, but for the sake of the other members of the community, can you speak about yourself and give a brief introduction of yourself and what you do and what you're doing?
Yeah, sure. Let me kind of give a quick intro about myself personally how, you know, Solace and the holder came to be. So it really started for me the whole crypto journey, you know, back I think, yeah, over five years ago. Now I was an engineering student back in the
West at the University of Illinois when I first came across an article about mining on Facebook that you could just run your computer and make money off of that. So that where the whole pool started happening. And basically I ran my computer mining
night and in the morning did the math and the economics of that kind of worked out. So, you know, I started focusing on that more and that was right around the time where ETH got pretty profitable with, you know, GPUs mining. And so for the next year, I started, you know, mind more
scale my own mining operations but also like working on helping other people set up mining farms, building like a few and then you know like selling buying mining hardware. So that was a really fun journey and exploration especially going through the whole like bulls
run back in, you know, end of 17 or 18 when it peaked. So, but then through that work, I realized that it's a lot about system administration, kind of like similar as you would upkeep your, you know, the computing facility
and all of that. So it wasn't so much on the application side or like product side or building on top of these different blockchains. And so that's when I started getting more and more interested with like E2.0 and you know like the charting upgrades to Ethereum. And so
I kind of stopped focusing on the mining in like mid-18 and then start working there. I met Prismatic Labs founder, so like the Prism client is like one of the biggest and the major ones for you know Ethereum Staking right now and like through that work, you know, I
got introduced more to coding smart contracts but also as underlying smart content technology works. By the time of 2020 when all the DeFi products really started taking off, I was managing some of my tokens, some
like other people's tokens as well and was leveraging all these tools early on. And one of the needs that I saw that wasn't really facilitated properly was the insurance niche. Of course, we saw a lot of smart contract hacks and exploits.
you know, due to like various like bat bugs or edge cases or like simple economic manipulations. So Nexus Mutual was you know the first ones out there and I just didn't really see that product fitting my needs.
So I thought maybe I can build something. And that's really how the soul has started. So for the first few months, I was just coding myself at the time I was on a computer engineer and PhD program at the University of California. And so that started to kind of take it off. I started hiring