Community Spotlight: Meeting Kostiantyn

The Arweave Project
3 min readAug 29, 2019

This week we catch up with Kostiantyn — BUIDLR of HiringChain, CrowdWeave and Arweave Petitions. When he’s not busy growing grapes in his vineyard, he works as a blockchain developer and has high hopes in building a free, decentralised future. Read on as we find out how HiringChain was born:

Country of residence: Ukraine

Occupation: Software Engineer

What do you like to do with your spare time? I grow grapes to make wine and brandy in my small vineyard near Odesa. And of course, I love travelling with my wife.

How did you find out about the Arweave permaweb? I first became interested in Arweave after reading an article on Medium. I studied the documentation, then I discovered the Open Web Hackathon on Gitcoin.

What piqued your interest in decentralization and the blockchain space, and when? Decentralization is not a new concept for me. In my previous role at Pandora Boxchain, we developed a solution for decentralized and censorship-resistant computations. We completed an MVP stage that used an on-chain protocol (ethereum based) and realised that we needed a universal, blockchain-agnostic solution. Now, Pandora Boxchain has transformed into PandoraCore — a Scalable high-load computing & machine learning protocol.

Why did you choose to build HiringChain? Ah, this is simple: I am currently looking for a job, therefore the idea to create a recruiting application on Arweave’s permaweb was formed through my own needs as a jobseeker. It made sense to write an application where employers could publish their job advertisements, and job seekers could publish their resumes. And so, HiringChain was born! It was also an opportunity to try Arweave’s technology and explore a new access to decentralized data storage. To my pleasant surprise, Arweave turned out to be much more than just decentralized data storage.

Do you plan to continue developing HiringChain for everyday use? No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure how I would go about monetising this kind of application, as marketing and advertising would be more beneficial to a platform like HiringChain, and this requires a lot of time and resources in order to scale. However, if anybody sees the potential in a platform like HiringChain, I’d be interested in helping to turn my simple prototype into a fully-fledged application.

What other communities are you a part of? I try to study and experiment with many modern technologies and protocols. I’m currently interested in the MetaCartel community, but I haven’t made any contributions there yet.

If you could build any DApp, what would it be, and why? All my attention is now focused towards DeFi and DAO. That’s all we need — unstoppable, censorship-resistant money and organisations. I want to be part of this revolution!

What does a decentralised future look like to you? I wish for an unstoppable, and verifiable identity on a network — I want to have stable and unstoppable access to the web, where I can store my personal data in a secure, and decentralised manner. I also wish to use digital currency like Ethereum and Bitcoin; all with small commissions. I want to build a censorship-resistant future, with as many applications possible. Let’s build a free future for all…

Where can people follow your work?

BitBucket: @Kostysh

GitHub: @Kostysh

Twitter: @mindsaur

Linkedin: kostiantyn-smyrnov

Wanna be part of our next community spotlight? Head over to GitCoin and check out our active bounties — happy hacking!

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The Arweave Project

A novel data storage blockchain protocol enabling a permanent serverless web and creating truly permanent data storage for the first time.