Community Spotlight: Meeting Merwane

In our latest community spotlight we meet Merwane: student by day, developer by night. When Merwane isn’t taking part in Arweave bounties, he’s exploring the plethora of decentralised communities and looking for new ways to make access to information more transparent, by building tools to support censorship-free journalism. Read on to find out more about our latest perma-BUIDLR 🛠😎

Country of residence:

France (But I’m moving to Germany soon!)

Occupation:

Student by day, programmer by night!

What do you like to do with your spare time?

I mainly spend my time hacking things up and building things on the web, but I also spend a lot of my time reading books covering various topics from algorithms to philosophy. My latest read was “Permanent Record” by Edward Snowden.

How did you find out about the Arweave permaweb?

I discovered Arweave on Gitcoin, a platform offering bounties and support for the open-source community. I fell in love with Arweave when I realized how it worked and the breakthroughs it could offer.

What piqued your interest in decentralisation and the blockchain space and when?

Like many people, Bitcoin introduced me to the concept of decentralization and Blockchain. I got introduced to Bitcoin at a very young age since I’ve always been curious about groundbreaking technologies. You can find out more about how I got interested in Bitcoin and Blockchain on my personal blog: https://blog.merwane.me/post/crypto-code-and-memes

What inspired you to build Grimoire and Permabird?

I created Grimoire and Permabird as a part of a hackathon Arweave hosted on Gitcoin — then I realized it wasn’t just about the prize. The technology piqued my interest, and I started creating things on the Permaweb just for fun and for the sake of experimenting. The first thing I thought was that Arweave deserved much more attention from the community, even if it’s still in its early days.

Do you plan on developing more applications on the permaweb?

Of course! I’m already building a few other apps simultaneously! I’m working on a production-level decentralized journalism platform, and on a bridge between IPFS and Arweave’s Blockchain.

What other communities are you a part of?

I started embracing some crypto communities lately, including the Ethereum dev community, because I believe in the impact smart contracts can have (as a developer), and the open-source community in general, because I think it provides a lot of necessary value to the industry. Some very appealing projects I am exploring are Bitcoin Cash, MakerDAO, and of course, Arweave!

If you could build any dApp, what would it be and why?

We are currently living in an era where information can have an extremely important impact on society. Unfortunately, some large and powerful entities are actively working on manipulating the masses with misinformation and fake-news, and this is why I’m working on a decentralized journalism platform where propaganda is impossible because there’s no central entity controlling the information. I want to empower every single journalist and individual by giving him/her the ability to write freely and to be heard by everyone, without any censorship.

What does a decentralised future look like to you?

Decentralization represents a digital revolution for every individual. I think we’ll see a lot of advancements in the near future when it comes to it. People will be able to communicate, trade or exchange without the need for a central entity, which will bring more transparency, and less censorship in an age where data and information are extremely valuable.

Where can people follow you/your work?

Mainly on Github, but I also often tweet about things I create:

Github username: @Merwane

Twitter: @merwanedr