Nominee Name

Silas Davis

Nominated By

self

Short personal bio

I am the CTO of Monax - a legal tech startup who are betting the entire farm on decentralised tech and Hyperledger Burrow, on which we run our production platform. I am an excellent tree-climber and strong swimmer. I studied physics and maths at Edinburgh and Cambridge in the UK (the small island nation just west of France). I have been a software engineer for a little over a decade - working in healthcare, natural language processing, and distributed systems. I am the lead maintainer of Hyperledger Burrow and a current member of the Technical Steering Committee. I have a daughter who looks a bit like a frog.

I believe in open systems and not having to ask permission.

My wares can be found: https://github.com/silasdavis.

Short personal pitch

In my debut year in the TSC I have learnt a lot from other members and contributors about how to think about technical problems sociologically; away from the code. There are some very good experienced engineers, who often manage to say things worth reflecting on.

The TSC seems to work (surprisingly it does work) on a balance of self-interest, corporate interest, personal ideology, and community solidarity. These mixing and opposing forces are what produce good (or at least reasonable) decisions. It is in this context I believe I can make a contribution by providing a particular viewpoint as a ballast and contrast to others. In particular:

• As the lead maintainer of Hyperledger Burrow, one of the the more indy projects, I will promote efforts for nascent projects to gain traction, tactical collaboration with bigger projects, and innovation in project formation, dissolution, and merging.
• With my experience as CTO in of a small 15-person company I will represent those who have different resource constraints than multi-national tech giants.
• I will seek to promote public permissioned networks and hybrid layer 2 blockchain projects because I believe that public permissionless networks should be the (stupid, slow) backbone of many private and enterprise networks.
• I will encourage convergence at the tooling, smart contract, and cross-chain layer, but less so at the consensus and network protocol level (I think it is too early).
• Having presided over some of the most successful cross-project work (assisting integrating Burrow's EVM with sawtooth-seth and fabric-evm (I emphasise having not done the work myself!)). I have experience working across projects and modifying Burrow's codebase to satisfy multiple not-us project's needs. I will look for and promote for small, practical, incremental cross-project work.
• I will encourage efforts for frameworks to support more hostile security models - e.g. byzantine faults, network partition, equivocation, zero-knowledgeness. Because I think lowering the bar of trust for new participants joining a network is a magic sauce, even for consortium networks.

Aside from this I will endeavour to behave as a decent human being, encourage participation from people are different from me, and be less late.