Although there are a few altcoins that have caught some attention in the media and have seen peaks of significant investment, there is no denying that Bitcoin dominates the industry by a landslide. According to , 36% of all US crypto owners have Bitcoin in their wallets. Influencer Marketing Hub Furthermore, the overall value of the currency has climbed from just $500 in 2016 to a whopping $17,000 per coin in 2022, which speaks to its incredible capacity for exponential growth. For software developer, Nikita Chashchinskii, Bitcoin, as the leading digital currency, has the potential to become a stable foundation for a market that has seen far too much volatility within the last few years. While many people are still naive and overwhelmed by this new sector of the financial market, Nikita is a part of a forward-thinking team spearheading the technology. The project is being developed with Drivechain and is positioned to make the world of cryptocurrency more transparent, and more secure at the same time. The Makings of a Blockchain Software Development Expert From a very young age, Chashchinskii was enthralled by science fiction and imagined himself as a protagonist in the novels that he would read, using technology to solve problems and make the world a better place. Video games allowed him to indulge in those fantasies and also presented a potential career path for his future. He was eager to learn, as his interest in software development grew, and he spent many hours of his childhood reading books about basic programming language and mathematical systems used in game design. By the time he was in secondary school, Nikita was experimenting with simple game design to begin putting the acquired knowledge into practice. At the same time, he continued to expand his studies and moved beyond basic C++ to learn more complex and professional programming languages like Rust, Haskell, and Python. Highly motivated and eager to jump into the industry, he even contributed to an open-source game engine through his last year of high school and the first year of college. Chashchinskii continued to do some freelance work during his college years. Then, while in his final year of his bachelor’s program, he came across an exciting opportunity to participate in an international competition where contestants were required to build Zcash sidechain software, to help enable privacy with Bitcoin, for the Drivechain project. He was familiar with the project and was enticed by its potential to create a distributed prediction market for cryptocurrency. Although he was very busy juggling school and a day job as a full-stack engineer, he used any free time he could find to work on the task and, in the end, was the only competitor who developed a functional solution. Hitting the Nail on the Head With Drivechain Nikita clearly had an affinity for Drivechain development and, as a result, he was brought onto the team to continue working on the project. After completing his bachelor’s program, he was accepted into a master’s program in software engineering. He pursued his studies, worked his day job, and continued to build more prototypes of the Zcash sidechain in his spare time. By the end of 2021, he let go of his job to focus on his studies and Drivechain-related work – which was particularly important, as he had received an offer for full-time employment on the project for after graduation. Unfortunately, Chashchinskii did not have the chance to complete his master’s degree due to the volatile circumstances in Russia. After leaving the country and relocating to Istanbul, he had much more time on his hands which he spent mostly on the development of  Drivechain, and during that time, Nikita really found his stride. Most significantly, he built a software library that makes it much easier to build sidechains of altcoins – enabling their unique features – within the Bitcoin framework. Nikita explains that “Right now, adopting new technology in the cryptocurrency world is usually accompanied by creating a new 'token' or 'monetary unit', fragmenting the network, making the cryptocurrency industry something lesser than the sum of its parts, creating internal conflict, and legitimizing ponzi schemes and other con-artist [techniques].” In contrast, the two-way-pegged Bitcoin sidechains that he is developing have the potential to unite the entire cryptocurrency industry. By enabling the adoption of a variety of new technologies, without creating any new monetary units, BTC could easily be moved from one technological platform to another. Furthermore, it could do so at a 1-to-1 exchange rate. This would allow individual users to independently make decisions about the risks and features that they want to explore, without affecting the foundation of the currency at all. As this project gains momentum, it is likely going to lead to Bitcoin absorbing the market share of all useful altcoins by converting them into sidechains. Chashchinskii has already built solid sidechain versions of both Zcash and Ethereum, and his innovative work has been featured in Bitcoin Magazine. He is very excited about this unification, as it will lead to a more trustworthy and predictable market. Currently, the hope of hitting it big with a new monetary unit is exactly the type of promise that schemers use to target investors, especially those who are inexperienced and easy to take advantage of. Of course, the project not only benefits the users within their massive network, but it is also a huge level-up for Bitcoin. Until now, Bitcoin has not been able to explore new technologies without bringing risk to its entire community, as well as to its own foundational software. With sidechains, they create an avenue for freedom and flexibility while protecting their core technology. The Drivechain project, created by , aims to improve Bitcoin to the point where all the other digital currencies become obsolete. LayerTwo Labs To achieve this, the cryptocurrency must combine privacy, scale, and versatility. It also has to function in every use case and include a more intuitive UX. LayerTwo Labs was founded by veterans of the cryptocurrency industry, and Nikita’s unique skills and aligned goals made him a perfect addition to the team. In conclusion, Nikita says “With Drivechain it is possible to copy any altcoin’s technology 1-to-1, creating a sidechain that is strictly superior to the copied altcoin, because it has the exact same features, as well as Bitcoin’s greater network effect… Drivechain [also] enables distributed censorship resistant prediction markets on Bitcoin, [which] would let us direct the predictive power of financial speculation towards forecasting the future – as well as potentially enabling other applications like financial derivatives, insurance, funding public goods, and governance.]”

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