Meet one of the Myria co-founders!
There aren’t many people in the world who can say they founded an accelerator-backed Bitcoin start-up in high school. Our Head of Blockchain, Brendan Duhamel, is one of them.
Speaking on how his passion for blockchain first flourished, Brendan said, “I was reading a lot about financial markets and the ills of the fractional reserve banking system from Murray Rothbard as a nerdy 16-year-old when I heard about bitcoin and started attending the MIT bitcoin club meetings a train ride away from where I grew up. I was hooked pretty quickly.”
Since those early days, Brendan has worked as the Blockchain Lead at the world’s largest blockchain trade finance network and also co-founded a decentralized crypto ETF project. Now as Head of Blockchain at Myria, his days are spent writing and reviewing code, making sure the team is positioned to produce good code by hiring the right people and giving those people the tools they need, and strategizing with the rest of the team about what innovative new code we ought to be writing.
When asked what excites him most about Myria’s roadmap, Brendan said “Myria Core” — which are our Ethereum Layer 2 Developer tools. “There has rightfully been much excitement over the years about the promise of Zero-Knowledge rollup solutions but I think the gap between possibility and actuality has been the lack of easy ways for creators to use these awesome technologies. For a long time, it took a team of cryptography PhDs to leverage anything ZK-related. The plans we have in place to make using a rollup solution as straightforward for an engineer as connecting to a REST API are going to make a genuine, long-term difference in the exponential adoption of all things blockchain. Which is awesome.”
A strong advocate for the merits of blockchain technology, he believes blockchain’s tokenization of the world, including gaming and all other industries, is going to entirely dwarf previous societal leaps; including the first universal coined money and beginning of joint stock companies, which facilitated some of the greatest financial and value-related innovation humankind has seen.
Some little known fun-facts about Brendan:
- Although he was born and raised in the US, he managed to obtain Irish citizenship while he was abroad there, through the link of his grandmother, even though she had already renounced her citizenship to become an American citizen decades ago.
- His all-time favorite game is Minecraft. “As a kid, I always dreaded the thought of beating a game or finding the edge of a map as the idea that the possibilities were finite bothered me. Minecraft was the first open-world game I ever played — no such limitations.”
- And his favorite part about working with the Myria team? Asia-Pacific meeting hours! As a night-owl whose brain has been hard-coded for peak software development at 3 am, it’s a blessing in disguise for Brendan to be able to work with a global team based all around the world.
Brendan will be answering all of your blockchain-related questions in our Discord Myria AMA sessions.
Stay tuned for our very first AMA in the coming weeks!