HACKER Q&A
📣 logicallee

Have you ever worked with a blockchain company that wasn't a scam?


backstory: I'm sure this will sound familiar to a lot of you. Someone contacted me in response to a HN post I made seeking a role as a product manager. They contacted me for a position at a blockchain company. It was very hard to reach them by replying to their mail. After several attempts on my part, we finally got the ball rolling with Google meet meetings, agreeing on terms, adding me to the discord, etc. I met the team virtually, which gave me confidence that this could be something real. They had an interesting idea and I was keen to work with them to bring it to market. Then they started ghosting me, their discord went dead, they missed their meetings, mail went unanswered, and their front page has the same prominent typos as we talked about fixing in our first meetings. Now it feels like a scam, which sounds like what I've read about with several blockchain companies. I invoiced them but don't really expect to be paid for the time I've spent working for them, chasing them for responses I never got and attending empty meetings they missed.

My question is, should I just blacklist any contact with blockchain companies? Have any of you ever worked with a blockchain company that wasn't a scam?

Everyone has their own standards but for me "not a scam" means that it delivered value to customers on par with a normal startup that doesn't have blockchain anywhere in its name or offering. i.e. if it is a blockchain shoe company, is anyone actually wearing a shoe they bought from them that they sold and shipped, like a non-blockchain shoe company would deliver.

  👤 wanderingstan Accepted Answer ✓
That's a false dichotomy: There are a lot of non-blockchain non-scam startups that have shipped products that none-to-few customers ever bought.

But to your question: Yes, I was the first employee at Origin Protocol back in 2017 and it definitely wasn't a scam.

https://www.originprotocol.com

We really did build a protocol (Smart contract + IPFS) for sharing economy transactions in the style of Airbnb, eBay, etc. Here's a video of me walking through the code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0oyEDlEQuM

We had a few earlier users, including rental company in Europe, but it never caught on. What we didn't realize was that the friction was just too much to make a market: People weren't willing to jump through all the hoops required for a crypto transaction (not to mention the conceptual learning) just to save 10-20%.

I left in 2019 and they've since pivoted to other product directions, but none that I would call scams.

👤 adastra22
There are plenty of non-scam blockchain companies. I’ve worked at a few, and started one myself. But unless you are an industry recognized cryptographer or something, the random inquiries you get are not going to be from good companies. It’s the scams who don’t care who they pick up as talent.
👤 ezedv
Yes, of course. I was able to create my startup with the help of Rather Labs; they provided all the assistance I needed to make my company. You can check them out: https://www.ratherlabs.com/
👤 zubairq
Yes, my own company Yazz is a blockchain company that is not a scam, building a software development tool that runs on the blockchain using crypto technologies. Code on github here: https://github.com/yazz/yazz
👤 is_true
Tickets. I wont name specific companies, but that space has a lot of companies adding value to the society right now.
👤 t312227
yes!