How Joe Roets Built 'Dragonchain', A Hybrid Blockchain Platform

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’m the Architect, Founder, and Chief Executive Officer of Dragonchain. I have over 20 years of experience in software architecture, focused primarily on security and scalability. I’ve created and led multiple technology startups and have led or contributed to projects at several companies such as The Walt Disney Company, Lockheed Martin, Overstock, Coinbase, and Compuware.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

We are Dragonchain. We solve real-world problems using blockchain technology.

Dragonchain provides a flexible, hybrid blockchain platform for businesses to rapidly deploy advanced applications, and integrate quantum-safe capabilities with existing systems.

What is the origin story?

Originally created at The Walt Disney Company in 2014 we were immediately focused on solving real-world business problems at an enterprise scale. In 2016 we published over 24 use cases being explored at Disney to the W3C Blockchain Community Group. Disney released the platform under an open-source license in 2016. The original team left Disney to commercialize the platform in 2017.

We benefited from developing and sticking to a philosophy of adoption focused on leveraging core capabilities of blockchain technology to build novel systems impacting any industry.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Passion. Coming from a wide range of backgrounds and talents, the team incorporates their drive for the adoption of blockchain with their past experiences and desires for a better future. We have a very well-developed community culture that aligns with our philosophy.

More importantly, our team and community are the smartest, most interesting, and best-looking people in the industry.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would be building a different startup.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We measure success by adoption. Our objective core metrics are tracked at metrics.dragonchain.com. We also consider new systems and integrations as internal core metrics.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We are most excited by customers that are building use cases that we never expected. We built the company to provide a platform with core capabilities that can be assembled in unanticipated ways for any business.

Also, we obviously have the best logo in the entire blockchain industry.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m most excited about blockchain, decentralized identity, and behavior systems.

I’m not really worried about any specific technologies, but maybe the way that some groups are using technologies, for example, censorship and control; which is why I’m excited about blockchain and behavior systems, because they will let people overcome powerful forces counter to liberty.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

HackerNoon has a great community, a great reputation, and consistently great content.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Be more ready to adapt and change.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Everything that you’ve been told about how the world works is untrue.

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