Team Leveor, Gold Medal winners of Blockchain Olympiad Bangladesh 2022, elucidates blockchain technology, its applications and its future in Bangladesh.
Congratulations on being the Gold Award winner in the professional category at Bangladesh Blockchain Olympiad 2022. Please tell us about your team. How did you get started in blockchain? What other projects involving blockchain have you been working on?
Thanks for the wishes. We’re Leveor, a group of creative professionals working at the intersection of deep tech and design to empower businesses and solve problems at scale with our interdisciplinary experiences. A bit about our name – ‘Leveor’ is Old French for ‘lever,’ a simple machine that helps to lift a load with less effort. Analogous to that, we at Leveor do all the heavy lifting for enabling early-stage startups and enterprise businesses to build, launch and scale solutions with several services – from protocol engineering, research, distributed system design, and dApp development to smart contract engineering, audits, infrastructure, and tooling.
Founded in late 2020, Leveor started with an aim to build the components shaping the future of the decentralised web. The founding makers already had experiences in scaling software solutions for the masses and a few accolades on previous blockchain olympiads – both on national and international rounds. Over the next year, we built different projects focusing on identity, ownership, verification, authentication and governance targeting a variety of industrial domains such as healthcare, supply chain and creator marketplaces among many others. While builders at Leveor Labs were busy experimenting with possibilities of what web3 has to offer, dreamers at Leveor Lens reinterpreted the experience of the next billion-user interfaces with designs, creative storytelling and marketing strategies. We are currently running our in-house and partnership projects as well as representing Bangladesh in international hackathons with a few open-source endeavours.
What would you say are your biggest strengths that let you secure the winning position at BCOLBD 2022?
This year, our team of practitioners bagged the Gold Medal in the professional category with our project ‘Shushashon/Good Governance.’ Another team of undergraduate students won the Document Authentication Award in the student category with their project ‘Zoint.’ Our proposed solutions focused on E-Governance, Document Authentication, Identity/Privacy, and Supply Chain Provenance. The biggest strength of both of our teams was the interdisciplinary experience. Both the teams had engineers, marketers and designers. The engineers on both teams pulled off a remarkable job at developing functional prototypes, detailed whitepapers, technical architecture and infrastructure governance. The marketers dove deep into researching the market, partners, revenue model, competitors and risk analysis while the designers shared their expertise in UI designing, UX research, video demos and posters. We believe the display and distribution of interdisciplinary balance have really put us ahead of our competition.
What are some possible use cases where we can leverage blockchain in Bangladesh? Where do you think Bangladesh is currently lagging behind?
In Bangladesh, there are quite a few use cases where we can harness the power of blockchain. E-governance, supply chain provenance, and payments/fintech are the first few ones we can tap into. Bangladesh is currently lagging behind in terms of active participation in the web3 ecosystem. The web3 landscape is enormous – the web as we know it is essentially on the cusp of a paradigm shift. From social networks, communication and entertainment to retail, logistics and commerce – there is a surge of startups raising funds to build, ship and scale the first wave of infrastructure and tooling for the future internet. A lot of us at Leveor are core contributors/early supporters of some of these early-stage startups and their products. We have observed an extremely limited representation of Bangladesh in these communities. The more we can educate people on how web3 works, the more participation we can expect from enthusiasts. That will lead to more exploration in space and thus, scopes of innovation.
Terms like NFT Utility and ReFi are gaining traction and are creating significant interest in the blockchain community. Could you elaborate on these concepts?
A lot of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) communities have faced quite a few problems due to the absence of a token economic model, non-composability, and governance. Hence, the idea of NFT protocols aiming to distribute governance, reward participants/contributors and incentivize composability or ecosystem application builders have gained the focus of interest. Now, protocols are combining decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) governance, fungible token inclusion, and decentralised exchange (DEX) integration to offer infrastructure and tooling. The goal is to provide NFT collectors with more tangible forms of utility other than digital ownership, such as exclusive access, product funding, IP rights collectively owned by the communities and shared licensing among many others. NFT is now being viewed as a tradable access key with a limited supply connecting multiple services offered by different entities.
WE BELIEVE THE DISPLAY AND DISTRIBUTION OF INTERDISCIPLINARY BALANCE HAVE REALLY PUT US AHEAD OF OUR COMPETITION.
The regenerative finance (ReFi) movement is one of the most promising applications of distributed ledger technology addressing climate change, conservation and biodiversity. To reach net zero emissions by 2050, ReFi projects aim to address the existing fraud or double-counting of carbon credits in unregulated carbon credit markets. On-chain carbon credits are traceable and immutable, meaning that no two people are able to claim the same credit twice. Thus, the ReFi movement uses programmable carbon to integrate climate finance into the fabric of economic transactions.
What would be your advice to aspiring blockchain engineers and currently enrolled students to succeed and contribute to the growth of this sector?
To become a skilled blockchain engineer, there’s no alternative to learning fundamental programming concepts. Along with basic web development skills, understanding how the underlying technology works, its technical parameters, core blockchain concepts, algorithms, and platforms will help anyone to build a career in full-stack web3 engineering. Becoming well-versed in the value proposition of web3 and perceiving why decentralisation matters are also important. There are quite a few free educational programs and DAOs from which anyone can teach themselves on web3 – Odyssey DAO, LearnWeb3DAO, Buildspace, Pointer.gg, DappUniversity, EatTheBlocks and UseWeb3 to name a few. There are also YouTubers like Patrick Collins or Nader Dabit offering hands-on tutorials to dive in. After going through these tutorials, anyone can participate in numerous online hackathons, bounties and security audits. In terms of career development, a lot of fully remote opportunities are there for anyone to grab.
The current ecosystems of content, goods, or services favour the large platforms and entities that sit in between the suppliers and their consumers. If you’re interested in shaping the future of an open, fair, and user-first internet where they can not continue to profit off as intermediaries, you’re more than welcome to join us to ‘buidl’ (yes, this spelling is intentional) the future of the decentralised web. With more web3 alternatives to web2 solutions/platforms emerging and moving towards consumer-grade adoption, there are still unusual avenues left to explore in the web3 space, and hence, the demand for web3 engineers is higher than ever.
