Departing Tendermint to start a new Cross Chain defi project

It has been a wonderful experience working with the Tendermint team in building out the Cosmos network, and it was an honor to have this opportunity. When I first joined, we had just launched the Cosmos network and closed our series A funding. A lot has changed since then. These days we have an ever growing engineering team, a Peggy implementation for the Cosmos hub, as well as a successful IBC upgrade.

I’ve always been a strong proponent of defi since joining the Cosmos ecosystem. One of the main areas of focus from my time leading the strategy team was towards building out DeFi projects and forming strategic partnerships with outstanding teams. I discovered many strong engineering groups that were just as excited about a Cosmos DeFi future as I was, and working together has further inspired me towards building out this ecosystem. One of the main projects that I have been pushing while at Tendermint was a Cosmos dex, and after going through many iterations, we finally released the Gravity Dex. I’ve also been extremely excited about Ethereum related tools including Ethermint as well as the Gravity Bridge, and I am deeply impressed by the level of commitment that my colleagues have toward building out these platforms.

Throughout the years, I have been fortunate enough to have worked with solid startups in the crypto space. I originally helped build out the ConsenSys team since the early launch of Ethereum, and joining Tendermint with the purpose of driving efforts in incubating, investing and forming partnerships with various projects and initiatives was one of the greatest opportunities of my career. After seeing a lot of this positive growth in the ecosystem and absorbing these experiences, I feel that now is the time to begin a startup of my own.

I am truly grateful for the support from the Cosmos community throughout and in challenging me towards understanding what it takes to create a blockchain protocol!

I’m looking forward to building out the Umee Network to bring cross chain defi use cases to the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems. Be on the lookout for updates as we’re developing the network!