Their Business Address: The World

Two entrepreneurs, time zones apart, are working on building blockchain tech and communities in a big office they call the world.

- Karen Mwendera

Typical of the times we are in and the digital industry they promote, these two entrepreneurs work closely together, but in separate time zones. Their work? Creating an open-source blockchain that will change the way we purchase and use digital assets.

We meet Riccardo Spagni in Johannesburg. Spagni, dressed in a pink t-shirt with an imprint of a pony on it, in his Woodlands suburb office, is the lead maintainer of the Monero project.

His colleague and co-founder, Naveen Jain, is based in Oakland, California.

From different offices, they comunicate everyday building their open-source blockchain protocol to help businesses and people manage, transfer and use digital assets. And they’ve called it Tari. For the uninitiated, the open-source model is a decentralized software-development model that encourages open collaboration.

“I like to see myself as the Elon Musk of South Africa, because I’m from South Africa as well,” begins Spagni.

He has had a knack for cryptocurrencies ever since 2011 when he found himself mining around in the ecosystem. In 2013, he founded Monero, which provides increased privacy through encryption of transactional information by using robust and recent encryption tools available to safeguard investments. It basically protects any transaction by offering parties absolute anonymity.

Jain got involved in Monero as a miner and also fell in love with cryptocurrencies.

“So when Naveen said to me ‘wouldn’t it be cool to like put natively digital assets on a blockchain’, I was like ‘hmm why’,” recalls Spagni.

Through research and understanding the advantages, Spagni changed his mind.