Jonathan Schemoul - Founder of Aleph.im Ep #48

<p>Anatoly Yakovenko (00:12):</p><p>Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Jonathan Schemoul with me, who's the founder of the Aleph.im project. Really awesome to have you.</p><p>Jonathan Schemoul (00:22):</p><p>Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here today.</p><p>Anatoly Yakovenko (00:25):</p><p>Cool. We usually start these with a simple question, how did you get into crypto? What's your story? What's the origin story?</p><p>Jonathan Schemoul (00:36):</p><p>Well, into crypto it's a long story. I started way back in time, a bit on Bitcoin then I stopped because it was only money back then. And that wasn't the end game for me. Then I came back into crypto in 2015, 2016, and I started doing a bit of development because I saw that I really wanted to be part of Web 3, to do nice things with it. I started developing as an open-source developer for a few projects. One of these is the newest project which is Chinese blockchain layer one. I'm not really involved with it anymore.</p><p>Jonathan Schemoul (01:16):</p><p>But working with them as a community open source developer, I saw that there was some missing links somewhere that you couldn't decentralize all the stack with just layer one, it is not the one that they were building back then. So that's how the Aleph.im project is born. For me, besides that, I've been developing for a lot of companies before in the IOT space and also for big banks sometime ago. I've been a developer for a lot of years.</p><p>Anatoly Yakovenko (01:48):</p><p>That's great. I mean, that's a great background. The thing that you're focusing on with Aleph is this idea that Web 3 is just a small part of the piece, but you still need UI front-ends, business logic and things sitting on top of the blockchain. How does that work?</p><p>Jonathan Schemoul (02:09):</p><p>The idea is that, okay, now you can have smart contracts on Solana, that's great. You can even do way much more on like just money on smart contracts, that's great. Now, you nee