My name is Jon, and I'm the Chief Operations Officer at ShapeShift. I've been in the Crypto and Bitcoin space since about 2012 and been building applications ever since. My background is both in software development and operations of technical teams. I've been doing that for about 16 years. Started just building web and mobile applications. I started a company that build web and mobile applications, and that then turned into focusing full-time on Crypto and the blockchain space in 2013. So I got involved in the blockchain industry after originally reading Satoshi's white paper back when it came out actually in 2011. I immediately scoffed at it and said, "Oh, well, that won't work." Forgot about it for about a year or so, then started hearing more about Bitcoin in the news when one of the original rallies started, I think it went from one to $30 in of the original Bitcoin rallies and that caught my attention of like, this is maybe something that I should pay more attention to. Maybe there's something more and I started digging more into the technology where I'd originally only given it a cursory glance. When I really dug more into the white paper, more into the technology around it, how the blockchain works, I just became fascinated and fell down the proverbial rabbit hole and ever since is just taken over my life in every aspect. For a while I became the crazy Bitcoin guy at my company. Everyone just didn't understand it and I was constantly talking about it, and then eventually that company became a blockchain based development and consulting company as more and more people started to understand what we were doing and what we're talking about and the opportunity really presented itself. So ever since then this has just been my life. I could toil for me to even remember a time before Crypto at this point. Yeah, so ShapeShift is a digital asset exchange. We call it an instant digital asset exchange that started in 2014, and it was started with the idea of trying to make it really easy and a really simple to use UX, to go from one type of Crypto asset on one chain to another. So originally, it was just a system to turn your Bitcoins into Litecoin, and basically all you did is, we give you a Bitcoin address to send to, you give us the Litecoin address that you want to send to, and one gets sent and the other one pops out the other side, and we do this all without ever taking custody of any customer funds. We thought this was a really important model to both build and demonstrate, because we wanted to show how using the technology, you could build things that you couldn't necessarily build before. A lot of centralized normal order book exchanges are really just rehearsals of old technology using Crypto. This was something honestly, entirely different and new that you couldn't have done before, and that's how we made our name. It's this ability to just easily transfer from one asset to another and ever since then we've expanded to all sorts of assets and at this point we support over 70 different assets that you can swap between through the platform. So there's all sorts of reasons someone might want to swap between different types of digital assets. I think the most basic one is just that people essentially speculate on the value of these things. So if you have bitcoin and you want Ethereum because you think that Ethereum is going to rise in value faster than the bitcoin, that's a very obvious reason that someone might want to do it. But some of it is just because it makes it easier for the blockchains to inter-operate and to be able to use their applications on that blockchain. If you want to use in Ethereum smart contract and you only have Bitcoin, you need some way to easily get Ethereum so that you can actually use that Ethereum to spend gas, to use the contract, I mean everything related to that. So really those are a couple of the use cases but there's a number of them. The main thing is we wanted to make these things more inter-operable, and our philosophy is because all of these assets are digital, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to very easily and relatively fresh and honestly just go from one to the other, unlike the kind of fiat on and off grams for there's always going to be friction because it has to interact with your baking system. Our idea was like, let's not even worry about that. ShapeShift doesn't deal with fiat at all. We just focus on, let's make it easy to go between these different types of digital assets because we think that's the wave of the future and where everything is going. So here's a demo of the ShapeShift platform. We're going to show you a very simple way that the ShapeShift platform allows you to transfer from Ethereum to Bitcoin on a single transaction. So here we've entered our Bitcoin address where we want the Bitcoin to be sent to and we've entered the Ethereum. There's things here that explain the current rate that we're offering, how much we can send, the minimum and the maximum as well as the minor fee that you'll be paying to the network. So here we're going to go ahead and hit start transaction, and it's going to give us a QR code and an address to send our Ethereum to. So I'm going to use my mobile wallet here to scan the address, and then I'm going to send amount of Ethereum. There it goes. So now ShapeShift has seen my Ethereum come in, it's now on pending confirmations. So it's waiting for a few Ethereum conformations on the Ethereum network, and then as soon as that happened it's going to send my Bitcoin to the address that I requested. There we go. So just like that. ShapeShift has received my Ethereum, it's converted it to Bitcoin and now we can see on the blockchain that I've been sent Bitcoin. So at ShapeShift we work with a gamble with only 70 different types of digital assets. A number of those are Ethereum and Ethereum-based assets but a number of them are not. Everything from Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Monero, Zcash, EOS, everything else, you name it. If it's an interesting block chain to consumers, then we're interested in offering on our service, and as a result we interact with all those platforms, we interact with all that technology, and then we interact with the various communities to help them debug and build it too because we end up seeing a lot of the issues of the software long before other people do generally because of our systems in the sense of how we scale them. Yeah, so that's a complicated process but essentially, we try to get an idea of where the demand for various assets will be. We look at the rest of the market to get a sense of what is the volume of trading on these various assets, how are they doing, are there any innovations they're offering that are actually interesting that we think we want to offer the community and we want to offer on our platform? We get a sense of market sentiment, then we decide based off of that. Here are the assets that we want to add. There's also a whole legal review process that they go in before we can add them to the platform. So there's a number of processes they go through and various what we call coin or token road map of which ones we're trying to add, at what pace, and how much effort it takes to. Like some coins and tokens are a lot easier technically to add, if for example ERC-20 tokens are pretty standard at this point. We know when we get into ERC-20 token, how to add that, but when you're adding a new block chain like a Monero, or an EOS, or Cardano, or some of these newer things, they're very different and they take a good bit more of work, so we have to factor in our technical resources and how much time and effort that might take. Best advice is to just get involved and start building things. Even if it's just for a problem that you want to solve, if it's for some idea that you have. If you just want to play around and create a prototype of something, build things, and I know we're talking to a university crowd but what I will say is, no amount of schooling is ever going to replace actual real-world development experience. You need to actually get out there, you need to build things, you need to get deep into the code. That's how you're going to learn the fastest and it's also going to make your actual educational experience a lot more fruitful because you'll have a lot more to bring back to the table. So my best advice and it's really no different, honestly in blockchain, compared to any other development field is you just need to get that real-world experience, build prototypes, build things, get together with a couple of friends, start a project. Whatever it is, it doesn't have to go anywhere, it doesn't have to be a successful business or anything like that but just build applications. That's how you're going to get your best experience because it will force you into roadblocks, and force you to solve those roadblocks, and the best developers in the world are not ones who know any specific language, no any specific technology, they are ones who have learned through years and years of frustration, how to solve problems and how to re-imagine things and how to utilize new technologies and learn as they go. That is the best advice I can give to any budding developer.
