The announcement of a Seattle branch office by NEO Global Development (NGD) on February 15th, 2019, made headlines in part due to the naming of former Microsoft executive John deVadoss as the head of operations.

DeVadoss has more than 15 years of experience working with Microsoft, where he served as an architect and manager of Microsoft’s .NET team, and also oversaw the birth and growth of the Microsoft Digital business as its general manager. NEO News Today’s Dylan Grabowski interviewed deVadoss at NEO DevCon 2019 in Seattle, Washington.

“This Is The Beginning”

John deVadoss started off the interview with praise for the NEO platform. Specifically, he mentioned NEO’s developer-centric focus, multiple languages, and unique consensus mechanism. He stated that the NGD Seattle office would focus on “tools” and “building blocks” (libraries and frameworks) to enable productive, high-quality development with reusable code on the NEO blockchain.

DeVadoss later expressed that the current era in blockchain “feels like the cloud back in 2006-2007.” This era gave birth to the two leading cloud computing services; Amazon’s AWS in 2006, and Microsoft’s Azure in 2008.

Decentralization

“Decentralization is the underlying principle for blockchain-based applications,” according to deVadoss, but he preached caution. “We don’t want to get too academic,” choosing instead to “serve the developer community” in a “pragmatic” way. DeVadoss emphasized the need to recruit software developers. In short, he advocates for decentralization to serve as a theoretical foundation for dApps, adding value to the finished products on a developer-friendly blockchain.

Applications of Blockchain

DeVadoss was optimistic about areas that will see the use of blockchain technology. “We are seeing very clear traction” for consumer and enterprise adoption of blockchain, he asserted, listing supply chains, pharmaceuticals, and fintech as areas leading adoption for enterprise. DeVadoss cited gaming, loyalty tokens, and attention tokens as consumer applications.

He reiterated, “I think we are just again scratching the surface.”

Developer Communities

“We have a unique advantage with NEO, which is the global communities,” deVadoss said, mentioning NEO-ONE, NewEconoLabs, City of Zion. “We look to them” to dictate the priority and focus of the NGD Seattle development queue.

Closing Remarks

“Look, I think we have a very unique architecture with NEO. Very unique algorithm for consensus. You look at things like PoW, a notion of probabilistic finality might make sense for Bitcoin and so on, but in terms of building dApps, PoW clearly is not going to be a viable path forward. PoS has its own challenges. I strongly believe that dBFT basis for NEO is a very strong theoretical computer science basis which helps us to scale, to grow, to be successful.”

“And secondly, we believe in developers coming in from everywhere. Multiple languages, multiple toolsets, this has been the underlying vision that Erik and Hongfei have put together.”

“We haven’t seen the beginning of this yet. This is gonna be a fun journey.”

DeVadoss’ interview with Grabowski can be viewed in full below:

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