Introducing: Jose Aguinaga, developer and blockchain technologies evangelist
By: Jose Aguinaga
Tags: Technology, Ethereum, Programming, Blockchain, Developer

Hello world! I’m Jose Aguinaga, a web3 developer, a full-stack engineer, and a cryptography enthusiast based in Switzerland. I’m currently the Head of Engineering at HOPR, a privacy-first blockchain project, and a tech consultant at Enigma Technologies OÜ, an E-Residency Estonian company. I’ve been around the crypto industry for the past four years, and I’m excited to share my experience with Portis’ users and developers alike and work alongside them to create new and exciting content together.

Background and experience

While pursuing my degree in Computer Science, I focused my career on web technologies and started to write about my learnings. In 2016, I wrote my first article at Medium, a satirical piece that made fun of the state of the web industry then, which landed me a spot as the keynote speaker at the JSDay 2017 in Verona, Italy.

Sharing about my experience has been one of the most rewarding feelings I’ve had as an engineer.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure to meet and engage with developers and startups across the world. I gave talks about web cryptography and payments, which quickly took me to the blockchain ecosystem. By 2017, I was already exploring storing data in the Bitcoin blockchain. Before the end of the year, I was sharing my experience again in Zug, Switzerland, which would shortly become the “Crypto Valley” of startups.

A receipt for the purchase of BTC from the train station at Zug, one of the first initiatives from the city to convert every train ticket machine into a Bitcoin ATM.

The 2017 ICO hype, MyBit and crypto winter

During what is known as the 2017 ICO hype, I had my first crypto-startup experience as the CTO of MyBit, a wealth management startup on top of the Ethereum ecosystem. I was brought in after their ICO to help them build the MyBit ecosystem, a series of smart contracts, SDK, UI libraries & APIs to allow users, investors, and developers alike to engage with physical assets.

At MyBit, I quickly learned about what it means to be part of a crypto startup and the challenges that such a volatile market introduces.

At that point in time, the ecosystem was pushing new projects daily. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, but most of them were interesting or were trying to change the way some concepts, like money, identity, or governance, were being defined. At that point, gold was being tokenized, art was defined in NFTs, and governments were toying with the idea of “Digital Identity”. The bull market had created optimism in blockchain technologies that moved it away from just trading and Bitcoin.

The bull market created a new series of exciting events, from hackathons to conferences. Here I am participating in the “Digital Citizenship” hackathon organized in cooperation with Lykke, the Blockchain Buero Liechtenstein, and Holochain. Picture by the HUS Institute, who organized the event in late 2017.

However, within a year, a new bear market would halt the optimism in anything cryptocurrency-wise. By early as January of 2018, thousands of coins, including Bitcoin, would lose 30–60% of their value or more. Known as the cryptocurrency crash, it would be the beginning of the crypto winter that would last over two years. Before the end of 2019, MyBit AG would close down operations. Like most startups at the time, the challenges in terms of user adoption, token economics, and general UX limitations in the crypto market, alongside a newly found skepticism in the crypto industry as a whole, brought the company funds to zero.

A new start: marriage and HOPR

To recover from the bear market, I did the only thing that made sense: get married! (HODL!!). After being engaged for over one year with my wife and traveling back and forward between Switzerland and Mexico, I thought it was time to settle down. In September of 2019, we tied the knot and went on a month-long holiday. By then, I was still recovering from the economic and mental pressure the collapse of MyBit had done on my persona, so I let myself have a long holiday for the first time over the last two years.

My wife became my rock over the last years during all the crypto madness. For better or worse, the crypto crash finally gave us a break from all the excitement the 2017 hype has brought.

As luck would have it, my honeymoon included Osaka, where I re-synced with an old friend, Dr. Sebastian Büergel who was participating at DevCon5 in the same city (sadly I missed DevCon5, as surprisingly enough, my wife didn’t like it as part of our romantic getaway). Sebastian invited me to check out HOPR, an open-source Layer-0 mixnet, where users would be incentivized to work as nodes to relay traffic. After learning about the project and learning about their technology, I jumped on a few calls, and the rest, as they say, is history. As of today, I work with a skilled team on the open-source HOPR protocol, which relies on the powerful libp2p library, to change the concept of data privacy for good.

HOPR’s founding team: Rik Krieger, Sebastian Bürgel, and Robert Kiel. I took the picture! Multiple online publications will soon use it to share the news about Binance’s investment in HOPR.

Portis and what’s next

Throughout these years, I have been closely following many projects across the industry. I’ve been to DevCon4, participated in online hackathons, engaged in the open-source community, and even joined the online KERNEL fellowship. I’m particularly obsessed about cryptography, privacy, and identity, and I’ve always wanted to share some thoughts on how blockchain is impacting society, in both the physical and digital world.

So when Scott approached me and invited me to publish articles as a guest author within Portis, it was an easy decision for me to take. I’ve followed Portis since they implemented gas-relay on user wallets, and had found their non-custodial wallets architecture based on end-to-end encryption quite impressive. With their latest acquisition by Shapeshift, there are multiple avenues for enhancement which I am excited to participate in.

Together, we will be publishing posts on multiple topics around custodianship, identity, developer experience, and general know-how about blockchain and cryptography. We’ll be sharing some stories, and although we’ll be revolving around the Portis & Shapeshift ecosystem, we’ll also be creating exciting content for the industry as a whole.

It’s my pleasure to support Portis in their effort to increase content for the blockchain ecosystem, to benefit everyone in the industry. The creation of exciting, academic, and useful content is useful for both newcomers and veterans. Together, we are looking to take an in-depth look into the technology around blockchain, and leverage the Portis platform to engage with developers and users alike.