BrainControl

After the birth of my second child, I realized it was time to find a “real” job. As part of my application to both Automattic and Mozilla (who were the only two companies I wanted to work for), I created the BrainControl micro-site. Although neither of the two companies I applied to work for responded, it did catch the eye of 500 Startups, who offered me a place within Batch 9 of their accelerator, which took place in Silicon Valley.

Launched at the same time Apple was banning Bitcoin wallets in the AppStore, BrainControl was one of the first brain-wallets that could be used from any mobile browser with an internet connection.

BrainControl was eventually deprecated and replaced by BlockStrap.

Notes

Launched: 2014

Skills:
App Development

Stack:
Bitcoin
BitcoinJS
CSS
FirefoxOS
HTML
JavaScript
WordPress

TL;DR:

???

Association:
500 Startups

Other Creations

Nukes

It’s like chess – but with nuclear bombs and an infinite number of players! Nukes is a true passion project and an industry I ultimately want to work within. Starting out as a traditional board-game, there are randomized setup variations that gave me the opportunity to start working on a browser-based version of the game.

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Bootblock

Bootblock is the first theme I had developed for WordPress using the new Gutenberg block system. It’s the same theme powering this website. The theme brings the Bootstrap CSS and JavaScript framework into WordPress providing a wide selection of components as a result.

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Project Eden

Originally built during a weekend hackathon, Project Eden was a result of my first experimentation with the WebAuthN HTML protocol that is used for PassKeys. This allow for the creation of crypto web-wallets that do not rely upon passwords and are cross-device compatible. This was also my first attempt at Schnoor based key generation and MPC transaction signing that allows for native accounts within both Bitcoin and Ethereum (EVM) based networks. With additional funding, this project could become an open-source competitor to the Coinbase Developer Platform. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1cGtLN081E[/embed]

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Ordzaar

Born from SADO – the initial version of Ordzaar was built by me and was fully decentralized. It worked directly in the browser without the need for central servers or databases. Everything was on-chain and permission-less. This project eventually out-grew me to became Cake’s 5th product vertical before then splintering into a registered startup of its own. The highlight for me on this project was having the opportunity to work with Stu Hampton and his Jim Morrison Doordinals collection:

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SADO Protocol

R1 was contracted by Cake to develop a protocol for the trust-less decentralized trading of Bitcoin Ordinals. I used IPFS to store semi-signed (PSBT) transactions, with CIDs published on-chain. The SADO protocol could allow for both 3 step instant purchasing as well as 6 step bidding mechanisms. Since the protocol relied upon UTXO data only, it could support a host of meta protocols beyond just ordinals. What initially started as a protocol eventually expanded into a suite of open-source tools and services used by Ordzaar – called Sado.Space:

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Granola Gnomes

Granola Gnomes is a passion project of my wife. I was responsible for generating the logo, mascots and website.

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Interplanetary Mail

Interplanetary Mail (IPM) was a fully-functional working interface for an unpublished protocol I designed that enabled two separated addresses on two different blockchains to communicate with each other by using IPFS as an intermediary. I referred to this protocol as IPCP – the Interplanetary Communication Protocol, and it could be used for a number of different use-cases. From private end-to-end encrypted communication such as IPM to public social-sharing such as BlueSky. I was at one stage hoping to raise funds to take this to market, but was instead side-tracked by my involvement with Bitcoin meta protocols, which led me to work on Ordzaar. The self-authenticating nature of this unpublished protocol and it’s use of IPFS was later used for the creation of the SADO Protocol.

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Asciiland

This was perhaps the most challenging project I have worked on. The first problem to solve was the creation of an algorithm to generate an ASCII-based hexagons of any size. This then evolved into needing to connect hexagons of any sized hexagon into a grid of ringed hexagons. The concept behind ASCII-land was that the metaverse is currently located within centralized servers that only exist in their fully rendered state. I believed there was a need for a metaverse that existed on-chain and did not need to be rendered in order to be visualized. This would in-turn future proof the land, which could then be rendered into any future unknown format – as opposed to existing only in Unreal, Unity, etc.

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Pandora

Never having launched on a public network, Pandora initially started out as a somewhat personal project to experiment with generative art from within the browser using WebGL and HTML Canvas. I started with simple geometric patterns before then moving-on to play with flow-fields and ending my exploration with generative landscapes. This then evolved into the creation of Non-Fungible Artists, which were capable of generating art. The idea was to experiment with the notion of these artists being more valuable for the less art they produce. Pandora was never launched due to concerns that the logic used to generate the art was not stored on-chain. This was the primary reason for my initial interest in the Ordzaar project, which inscribes files on-chain using Bitcoin ordinal theory.

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Destinations Unknown

After some health issues that arose during Covid, I spent six months producing an album using OpenSource tools and royalty free samples. Track 1 – Warping Time – Tribute to Winston Churchill Track 2 – Dark Times – Tribute to George Floyd Track 3 – Glitching Ghosts – Tribute to Christoph Ghosthack Track 4 – First Contact – Juxtaposition-ed Melodies & Self-Doubt Track 5 – Angels Falling – Tribute to My Wife Track 6 – Attacking Mars – Tribute to My School Principles Track 7 – Space Cadet – Experimenting with MIDI Track 8 – HyperDrive – Making Sense of 200BPM Track 9 – Cruising – Tribute to Orsen Wells Track 10 – Knowing – Tribute to 12 Monkeys Track 11 – Never Enough -[…]

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BloqVerse

Powered by Neuroware’s Cortex and developed for the BlockChain Embassy of Asia, BloqVerse was a Massively Multiplayer On-Chain Role-Playing game that was used to research different approaches to upgrading deployed smart-contracts whilst also helping to onboard consortium organizational members within Malaysia to BCE. Included below is a technical presentation on the topic:

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Everstore

EverStore was a protocol that I developed to allow for CRUD-like database functionality to be permanently stored within UTXO based blockchains to provide eternal censorship resistant data-storage. Prior to the launch of Segregated Witness scripts on Bitcoin, a single transaction could only hold up-to 38 bytes. EverStore utilized the structure of hierarchically deterministic key generation to provide a schema for storing large data-sets:

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DN-Key

DN-Key was the first protocol that I published. It is an extremely simple protocol used to broadcast public keys using DNS TXT records and is the foundation upon which other protocols and products are built. It allows for a more conventional username experience when dealing with blockchains and is cross-chain compatible.

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BlockStrap

BlockStrap was the first product to be launched by Neuroware during the 500 Startups accelerator program in Silicon Valley. We launched the product at TechCrunch Disrupt and then conducted a European Tour to help onboard developers to the blockchains. BlockStrap was also chosen by DBS Bank Singapore to be an official API provider for the world’s first bank-backed blockchain hackathon that took place in 2015. Our developer tools and APIs were also used by the 2nd place-winner, NuBank. We provided a series of free workshops to help onboard developers leading up to the two-day hackathon.

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Neuroware

Neuroware was the name of the company accepted into 500 Startups, which then went on to raise over MYR 1,000,000. This was also the time where I spent improving upon my branding and user experience skills. I was responsible for all the marketing material and product designs. Our first product was blockstrap, which was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2014. Five years later Neuroware launched its second product – Cortex:

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MongoKong

Developed as a MongoPress theme, MongoKong transformed the CMS into a fully-functional interface for designing RPGs within the browser. Unfortunately, several months after starting work on this and MongoMail, the company I was working for ceased operations.

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MongoMail

Developed as a MongoPress theme, MongoMail transformed the CMS into a fully-functional interface for IMAP email accounts. Unfortunately, several months after starting work on this and MongoKong, the company I was working for ceased operations.

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MongoPress

At the time, the company that I worked with specialized in geo-location and had a data-set of nearly a billion records in MySQL. I was hired to research and develop new tools utilizing MongoDB, which for the geo-queries we were conducting performed 6,000 times faster than MySQL. We originally set-out to create a WordPress plugin that would enable us to replace MySQL usage with MongoDB, but eventually discovered that it was not possible to do what we needed without forking WordPress. Instead of forking the CMS, we created MongoPress from scratch. Two distinct themes developed for MongoPress include: * MongoMail * MongoKong I also gave a presentation at WebCamp KL as part of a CMS-battle.

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gPress

Once WordPress had properly introduced and provided the necessary support for custom post types, I no longer needed to continue developing GeoPress as I was then able to bring the same functionality into both WordPress and the recently launched BuddyPress. In it’s initial release, it provided integrated FourSquare support, which was eventually removed and made available as an additional module that was not part of gPress core. gPress was also the first “geo” specific plugin for BuddyPress.

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GeoPress

Once upon a galaxy far away … There was a time when WordPress did not have custom post types. Foursquare had just launched, but there was no open-source platform for geo-tagging and so I took on the challenge of creating one using the same back-end framework that once powered WordPress and bbPress. I was already a WordPress theme and plugin developer, but by contributing to the BackPress project, I was able to gain a much deeper understanding of the inner-workings of WordPress. GeoPress was eventually deprecated and replaced by gPress.

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