What it’s actually like being a blockchain developer

Developers were not making bank

This is the biggest misconception I see being floated around about developers in the late 2017 blockchain period. People believe we were all earning ridiculous amounts and setting ourselves up for life, however, the truth is quite different.

Most of the money around the ICO craze was directed at the owners, not at the developers who were making the products. Much like the startup boom in the tech world, the money flowed freely to the marketers and entrepreneurs, not the developers. There’s a simple explanation as to why;

The market did not and does not care about products but rather economics.

This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a shift from what I expected going into this space. People were investing based on “potential merit” rather than actual merit.

Late 2017 was early stages for most ICOs, so the hype investment was expected. No one had really built anything yet, you were selling your ideas of what you could build and trying to monetize that in order to build it in the future. Unfortunately, the hype-driven market continued to thrive and still is to this day.

Companies do not want to build the product

During all this, developers were being approached to stick their name on a product rather than work on that product. Nowhere is that truer than here in Australia, where many ICOs that succeeded in raising the funds did not have a solid development team behind them. Instead, they believed that by raising the funds they could then go out and secure that team. This was, turns out, a flawed assumption as the products they offer are not feasible or in some cases not possible to build.

For most ICOs, the feasibility didn’t matter since they didn’t actually want to build the product. Releasing the final product limits your ability to deliver hype based news, which drives the token economics forward. Once your product is out, you’re judged on that product and your ability to deliver constant innovations. Before the product is released, you’re judged on your marketing of that idea.

It’s much easier to exit a scam prior to releasing a product when you can blame the market conditions for your inability to deliver.

I don’t believe that the majority of ICOs who have exited out planned on doing so during the 2017 boom. It might be naive, but from the conversations I’ve had, I believe they genuinely thought that the development part would be the easiest to secure with the capital they raised. However, once the market started to turn, people’s agendas shifted. Companies wanted out and wanted out fast.

It became almost a game, how can we dump our tokens and exit out without making it seem like we are scamming the consumer?

If they had released a product, getting out becomes much harder.

Most companies became a scam

I think this was the hardest part of being a blockchain developer in 2018. ClearPoll was doing well, we had released everything we planned to and I was looking to secure some work post-release. I met with various ICOs who were after a blockchain developer, some of which already had front-end but needed the blockchain aspect developed up. It was exciting for me, the money craze had died down and now companies were looking for the benefits of the technology rather than the token. Or so I thought.

It was a repeating story, I would meet with the team. Hear their pitch on what they were looking to do, sometimes it seemed out of left field and sometimes it sounded achievable. I would offer my pitch, what I could offer and so on. Everything would be going well. Then I would ask if I could meet the rest of the team, or what they had built so far. That’s when it would all come crashing down.

One of two things happened every time, either they had no team and the people on their ICO site were paid to pretend to be developers. Or, they had an entire team of developers but had not built anything in the year since their ICO. I mean, literally had not built anything. In one particular instance, I was sent some code that was a literal copy-paste of Ethereums “geth” code base. It was insanity.

The worst part of the whole experience was that they weren’t looking to actually resolve the issues. They didn’t want to build, they wanted me on the team to say that they had a blockchain developer. Offering a passive income for just existing on their whitepaper or LinkedIn.