Thread by @heygleb

0/n After almost 2.5 years, it is with great pride, respect, and love to announce that April was my last month at Deutsche Telekom.

We accomplished smth i never thought possible at a large (#86 of Fortune500) company. It was a crazy ride so here is a thread about our journey🧵

1/n My job interview end of '18 started off with me presenting differences between DEXs and CEXs in shitty German and lying about believing that blockchains can exist without a digital asset and that private blockchains are dope.

My infiltration plan worked as expected.

2/n Shortly after joining in Jan 19 i started talking @mopsko into either focusing on interoperability by developing on Cosmos or Polkadot, making the enterprise PoCs future-proof, or better yet running validators for these networks because we have the skills/resources to do so.

3/n The argument was very simple, let’s use existing resources and security expertise to run secure IT service (our daily biz).. for a network.

We had yet to figure out the whole topic of buying, custody, selling accounting and taxing crypto-assets. This was the hardest part.

4/n As we refined the narrative, it became clear that it's telcos core biz to provide public network infrastructure.

We started with telephony and Web2 infra. In Web3 public network infra takes from of nodes, validators, oracles, transcoders, etc. Running those is our duty.

5/n With this narrative we fundraised from internal innovation budget.. but never saw the funds due to some weird accounting issue between multiple legal entities.

We thought it’s over.

6/n However the management team took the leap of faith to finance the project regardless as they believed the vision and saw the opportunity.

"Do now apologize later" is a true chad move and a rare occurrence at a large company and represents a correct approach to innovation.

7/n As we were making progress, we needed to find stake for our prospective validator.

We have found a German VC with $DOTs and were in the process of developing a tailored validator offering.

8/n Due to some risks and uncertainties outside of our control as well as the unclear launch date of Polkadot, we had to search for alternatives to justify mounting expenses.

9/n After Chainlink meetup in Berlin and talking to @EidJohann and @hendrikhofstadt, we decided to try ourselves as Chainlink Node operator.

The seemingly simple oracle business model and not needing a self-bond made it an attractive case for us to pivot to.

10/n This posed another challenge however, we had to buy crypto, $ETH, not just earn/sell it, which is another beast entirely.

Here @danielschrdr help was invaluable to get this as well as internal processes structured around dealing with crypto-assets.

11/n Paying with crypto for a service anonymous (non-KYCd) miners provide without an invoice to conduct txs in a public open network in return for a payment in volatile crypto from the network and/or DeFi dapps.. expectedly raised eyebrows of quite some corporate departments.

12/n This was probably the hardest part to solve internally and required a lot of education and patience. But with a clear thesis we pulled this off.

We were also helped by our partners @Finoa_Banking and Bankhaus Scheich to get the custody and brokerage going.

13/n We finally launched our Chainlink node at the end of June pushed through by @TobiWoWo and the rest of the team, testing @tyrion70 patience in the process lol.

But the fun was just starting.

t-systems-mms.com/en/expertise/a…

14/n The morning of the launch i get the call from our corporate comms about an email from a so-called Zeus Capital claiming we are ruining people's lives (wut?).

After some FUD management and explaining, we put this behind leaving them on read... and liquidated.

15/n We also launched right into DeFi summer, where gas spiking above 400 has become a normal occurrence.

This has put a great strain on our internal processes as apparently swapping ETH on Uniswap is not the way corporate procurement works.. a bummer.

16/n With our Chainlink node go-live we managed to start monetizing the growth of DeFi (where we don't have a right-to-play on the dapp level) from the infrastructure level (our home turf).

With staking soon, i would expect the network to continue dominating the oracle space.

17/n Next was @flow_blockchain, where we went live as an Execution Node, offering now Staking-aaS in its classic sense to any $FLOW token holder.

news.bitcoin.com/t-systems-and-…

18/n The business case we calculated was based on a “conservative 5x” and "optimistic 20x" from the community sale price of 10 cents. Little did we know…

So much about business case predictability in #Web3.

19/n More about the Web3 infrastructure thesis we gradually built up and some of the takeaways up until that point here:

medium.com/@heygleb/block…

20/n Network Lifecycle Investing thesis from @jbrukh was the next on the radar – being able to participate in blockchain networks throughout the entirety of their lifecycle from investing in tokens, to operating validators to developing use-cases.

blog.coinfund.io/diving-into-ne…

21/n Here, @CeloOrg, being a telco-oriented protocol, crossed our radar from several corners of the company.

It was an ideal network for us to unite the VC, infrastructure and pure telco parts of the company to implement the thesis.

coindesk.com/celo-network-a…

22/n Our infrastructure track record with Chainlink and Flow combined with our Web3 infrastructure thesis helped us to get approval to invest in tokens, a topic still stigmatized in traditional investment circles.

More great news is coming here.

23/n Having proved its ability to participate in the whole lifecycle of public networks, @deutschetelekom is well-positioned to scale further and double down on its duty to operate *some* of the public network infrastructure of Web3 and support the open-source innovation.

24/n Wish I had enough space to thank all of the team for their support and sticking to our crazy project and making it work despite all odds. @mopsko @danielschrdr @TobiWoWo @MrJackisch and many more!

Can't wait to see the networks they support in the future!

25/n We have achieved several pretty unique milestones and i felt i'm ready to move to a new project and shift my perspective a bit.

Will update on the next steps in coming days. Not leaving crypto, thats for sure.