Simon Harman

Simon Harman is Founder of Chainflip, Oxen; Co-Founder and Project Lead at Loki. He has been heavily engaged in the blockchain industry since 2015. His broad skill set and adaptability have led him to be an influential member of the cryptocurrency scene in Australia. A recognized industry thought leader and blockchain expert, Simon played a role in the redesign and running of the Talk & Trade, a weekly discussion about current affairs within the blockchain and crypto industry, at the Blockchain Centre in Melbourne, assisting startups in educating themselves on blockchain technologies and its potential use cases. Accross the team I’ve had the privilege of building teams that have produced several products, including: Chainflip, a cross-chain AMM designed to seamlessly allow users to swap tokens across ecosystems without violating chain sovereignty; Session, a secure messaging app based on the Signal protocol that has no phone numbers, central servers, and onion routes messages over the Loki network. I’m a long time cryptocurrency enthusiast, and my work is inspired by democratic values. On top of the several protocol designs for several distributed systems that I wrote along with Kee Jefferys, Maxim Shishmarev, and Jason Rhinelander, I’ve written extensively about the nascent and arguably non-existant field of cryptoeconomics. My interest in economics and finance stretches back to my high-school days, and overlying these disciplines on top of the crypto space highlights some very interesting and sometimes deeply problematic phenomena in the industry. My aim is to define and draw attention to the various games being played in the industry, and to design or evolve better games which can be used to improve the stability and performance of cryptocurrency assets for their intended functions.