STEVE HENLEY
Steve is a thought leader, strategist, innovator and entrepreneur with 30 years of industry accomplishments at both large and small companies. He has been an RChain cooperative member for one year. He takes an active role in the RChain community by leading the dApp Developers working group and the newly formed Wallet Development and Testing working group. In addition, he participates in weekly sessions for: Casper Standup, Dev Standup, RChain Member Zoom Hangout (scribe), Governance Committee (monitor/scribe), Blockchain music (RSong), Member’s Q&A, Blockchain Art, Casper Collaborative Learning and Computational Calculi Colab.
His active engagement over the past year has provided him with great insight into the RChain platform and cooperative which in turn will help him provide guidance to RChain to navigate its future as a compute public utility.
His work experience in technical support for the telecom industry, both domestically and internationally, gave him a deep appreciation for the importance of managing customer expectations. As a board member, he will help to instill a culture that values and recognizes the importance of customer support and responsiveness.
He will work smartly to help RChain achieve its goal to become the first proof of stake blockchain platform that is fast, scalable, and secure. The world desperately needs the social coordination technologies that RChain will offer in order to help solve the climate crisis as well as other pressing world and societal issues.
He looks forward to continuing his active participation with the RChain platform and cooperative as an RChain director.
EVAN JENSEN
I am Evan Jensen, an attorney in the state of Washington, with a specialized LLM in financial technology. RChain Cooperative has been my sole concern since the day I filed to create it.
It is hard to believe it has been three years since Greg asked me to form the Cooperative with him. It has been an incredible journey so far, and although we have reached a pivotal milestone, it is still a journey that is not yet finished. And it is one that I would like to see through if the members see fit to reelect me as director. If so, I will be the first director to be reelected twice.
We have had a bumpy road to get to where we are, but Mercury is imminent, and Mainnet launch is locked in. This has been my chief goal and principal focus as director for this first leg of the Cooperative’s journey, and if reelected I will maintain the same focus on ensuring the primary mission of the Cooperative is accomplished. Specifically, the development of the RChain blockchain, designed to be both used and run by the members decentralized among many computers around the world. The goals for the second leg of RChain’s development, however, will be different from those of Mercury.
Many people see in the Cooperative many different goals, each tinged by their unique perspective. Environmental, artistic, recreational, operational, even idealistic in the implementation of decentralization, for privacy, or any number of other end goals. And these are all important and worthy efforts. However, one point upon which all members of the Cooperative should agree is that the fundamental RChain platform itself is the primary function of the entity that is the Cooperative, without getting too far afield in its many and varied possible applications. I fully expect many members to use the platform for any number of purposes, and those efforts are to be commended and encouraged. However, generally the Cooperative itself needs to keep its focus narrowly on the platform as much as possible, although selective other efforts in key areas from time to time may be necessary or advantageous.
Having largely completed the first and most vital leg of the project’s development with Mercury, the question before the membership and the directors right now is to determine the long-term plan for the next major phase of RChain. It is my opinion that the best path forward is an aggressive and ambitious Venus development timeline over the next three years.
Development of the platform needs to be the primary focus, as we are in the end playing catch-up compared to Ethereum which has had four years post-launch to mature already. Additionally, now is the appropriate time to be pursuing business development opportunities with established companies, who may find they can benefit from using the RChain technology in whatever way suits their purposes best. RChain’s highly-scalable transaction capacity should result in significantly lower transaction costs than on other blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, potentially making decentralized solutions practical for business and industry applications.
Numerous business ventures built on top of Bitcoin or Ethereum in the past few years eventually began to struggle simply due to the increasingly high cost of transactions, and RChain could solve that problem for them. Data transactions and creating permanent records of many types are an excellent blockchain application, but due to the high cost of transactions on previous blockchain technologies, it was just cheaper to use a traditional database. Existing companies who have been on the fence about using blockchains for the same reason could start to experiment with prototypes on RChain. Still, it is likely that established businesses will be slow to change, and we must be prepared for the fact that this will take longer than the timescales that many in high tech, in its boundless haste, believe are typical. These things take time.
I hope you will vote in favor of me continuing to serve as a director in the Cooperative. And thank you for your ongoing support of the Cooperative.
ERIC MENG
I’m the founder of WeNode and TokenJar. WeNode is a staking pool specifically for RChain. TokenJar is a decentralized exchange featuring one-click free listing.
I have 20 years of experience in high-tech and telecom. I got involved in crypto space in 2013. After two years of hard development, Mainnet is close at hand. It’s the most difficult time in RChain’s history. And it’s the beginning of RChain’s renaissance.
As believers of RChain, we need to rebuild the confidence of the community and establish a healthy and workable governance structure. We have a lot to learn from the past two years. We need to get more people join the community and contribute. We need concrete action to bridge the gap between a great mission and our advanced technology.
The Chinese community is a strong supporter of RChain. China has thousands of people who believe in RChain and Rholang technology. My mission is to get more Chinese involved in RChain’s ecosystem and to build a powerful Chinese community. I will:
- Promote RChain and Rholang technology in China.
- I’ll try to help more Chinese holders to serve as validators for RChain, not only by WeNode staking pool but also by teaching them to run RNode on their own servers.
- In 2020, I’ll focus on attracting more Chinese talent developers to develop dApps on RChain.
- In 2021, after Venus, I’ll shift my focus to business development. I’ll try to promote RChain adoption in China’s banking systems, supply chain systems, and property rights systems.
DARRYL NEUDORF
I have been involved with RChain from before its inception; I was an active member of the Synereo community beginning in early 2015. From March-September 2018, I worked for the RChain dApp, Resonate, as Industry Consultant and in UX Design. I have continued my involvement with RChain throughout the last year and have been employed as a contractor since July, working in member communications and outreach.
My background is in music, having worked on several Gold and Platinum albums throughout my 30+ years in the industry. I have produced hundreds of albums, overseeing the projects from start to finish. This involves maximizing budgets and working with the various entities (artists, labels, managers, publicists, publishers etc) in order to find common ground that allows the art to flourish while allowing the product to achieve sales goals set out by the various entities involved. My passion is in rooting out the middlemen in an industry infested with them—hence my interest in blockchain’s potential for creating alternative solutions for the artist/appreciator relationship.
I also have experience with co-ops. I worked with Mountain Equipment Coop (Canada’s REI) in the early ’90s, eventually becoming a shop steward, representing workers to the co-op warehouse management. Through that experience, I learned about co-op governance and witnessed MEC deal with rapid growth, confronting the challenges that occur with governance and member participation as companies expand.
I believe strongly in the co-op structure for any decentralized project. I’m passionate about the expanding roles that 21st-century co-ops will play as we continue to witness the rise of novel web 3.0 governance structures and the challenges surrounding what happens with our data.
Over the next year, I intend to work closely with helping set up and supporting working groups and committees, grassroots member outreach, mediation between members and board, harnessing collective intelligence in decision making, and supporting a healthy membership that can help the coop flourish in whatever way we can.
STEVE ROSS-TALBOT
I joined RChain for two reasons.
The first has its roots in the process algebra community started by the late professor, Robin Milner, of Pi-calculus fame. Robin was my mentor and also my friend. His work has had a profound effect on how I decompose complex problems and was the heart of all of the work I did at W3C as well as being behind everything I have done since that time.
The second has its roots in my fundamental belief in a more participatory democracy. Having been born in exile in the UK of an English/Irish father and a Cape Coloured mother, I have always had a strong moral compass founded on one person/one voice and one person/one vote. In these troubled times I have become convinced that a new form of governance for by the people are fundamental to greater collaboration. The sort of collaboration needed to tackle climate change, to help transform to a more sustainable way of living.
RChain as an idea as opposed to the technology; RChain as a way of collaborating; RChain as an evolutionary way of organizing ourselves all fit with my fundamental beliefs. It is what initially attracted me to RChain.
RChain as a technology founded on proper mathematics attracts me because of my love of Pi-calculus and higher-level process algebras, which I have long believed needs to come to the fore as we add complexity on complexity.
For the last 10 months, I have been a NED on the RChain board; prior to that time I was the Chair of RChain Europe. I have, I hope, served well thus far, always having the members in mind as decisions get made.
I would certainly relish the opportunity to continue the journey as a member of the board with a specific focus to ensure that as a co-op we respect the notion of one person/one voice and one person/one vote as we seek to extend empowerment using our own technology base, and with a specific focus to grow as fast as we can to build a sustainable future for RChain as both a technology platform and as a cooperative organization willing to go through the pain and joy of learning along the way.
As a computer scientist from the early 1980’s I have seen much change in our industry and held many positions. I have been a CXO since 1997 having started SpiritSoft that gave the world JMS, CEP, and ESB’s. I have chaired all of the WS* standards at W3C with and emphasis on choreography expressed as a higher form of pi-calculus. I have raised in excess of $100M in VC funding and founded many companies. And I am a professor appointed as such for my contribution to distributed computing.
I hope to continue to bring all of that experience in the pursuit of a dream at RChain.
Dan Salkov
I am an Analyst with over 10 years of experience in global asset management. I believe that I am the right person for this role because of my extensive academic background in large scale conversion, redesign, project management, and cryptocurrency market analysis. I strongly believe that I can provide the cooperative with my financial experience to act in the best interest of all stakeholders.
I am currently the lead project manager for one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by Fortune, T. Rowe Price. As a long-standing member of the co-op, I want to help direct the strategy for the success of RChain. The future of RChain goes hand in hand with trust and transparency, and I will stand to uphold these values.