ETHLend
As some of my followers may know, I write for the Ethereum start up ETHLend. I started out blogging about cryptocurrency on the weekends because it is a fascinating subject and there is always something to write about. I felt the best way to learn about the subject was to try and explain it to non-technical readers. Often, the hardest people to convince of this tech are non-technical readers. The technical readers have either investigated the tech themselves and have made up their minds how they feel about it, or, if they haven't, they aren't going to come to my blog for their information, at least not initially. For this reason, a majority of my posts are geared toward non-technical readers (with a few exceptions 1, 2, 3, 4). This was mostly a weekend hobby, but when I heard ETHLend was looking for technical writers to write about the development they were doing I jumped at the chance to get paid for a weekend hobby. I quickly got in touch with Jordan, and we started the discussions with Stani on the ETHLend slack channel.
My "Job"
The majority of my duties involve explaining the breakneck development that the ETHLend dev team is doing in as simple terms as possible, as well as positing thought experiments with regard to where this tech could possibly lead and implementing these ideas in experimental code. This has been an absolutely blast, and has allowed me to approach the decentralized ecosystem from the perspective of a lending platform. It's one thing to read about a Solidity library and follow someone else's tutorial, it's another to actually explore it through concrete use.
LEND
One of the most fascinating aspects of working with an Ethereum start up that was pre-ICO, was I got a bit of insight into the world of ICOs that I otherwise wouldn't have. During my negotiation with Stani before I started writing for ETHLend, we agreed that payment would happen completely in LEND. Since these tokens were pre-ICO, they hadn't hit any of the exchanges and had no valuation. To put this into perspective, 1K LEND is equal to $150 now, but at the time of negotiation, neither Stani nor I had any idea what these tokens would actually be worth. The ultimate skin in the game.
As crazy as it may sound to some, this is one of, if not the largest, motivators for me to accept the position. I felt I was following the footsteps of many in the crypto community who came before me, like Vitalik Buterin and Andreas Antonopoulos. The legend of being paid in crypto appealed to me.
I also find it fascinating that a protocol can create their own currency which it can use to pay it's members and sustain itself. This is one of the most important disruptive aspects of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency will be around for a long time because of the fact that an entire digital economy can be built from software. This gives software engineers an avenue to monetize open source projects. Which incentivizes more developers to go the open source route, driving the creation of more digital micro-economies.
It's also ruthlessly free market. If the market decides this token (and therefore the protocol, or software backing it) is useless, then the project dies. This is why my excitement at being paid completely in crypto may seem foreign to some, as there is obviously a large amount of risk involved. An agreement to be paid 100 LEND per word can just as easily be worth $100 as it can $.01 after the ICO.
Thank You
I've recently received my first payment of LEND tokens for my writings, and for that, I am extremely grateful to the ETHLend team for all of the hard work they've put behind the project and give the tokens value to the decentralized community. I'm grateful at the opportunity to join the ranks of writers to be paid fully in cryptocurrency. I'm also grateful to be a part of this new version of the decentralized economy. Finally, I'm grateful to everyone who's read any of my material, argued with me, debated me, and most importantly asked questions. Here's to another year of cryptocurrency!
Jackson