A place for anyone to introduce themselves, whether youāre working on, interested in or simply a bystander to Vega. Feel free to include answers to as many of these questions as you want.
What brings you here?
Whatās your dream use case of Vega?
Favourite crypto meme?
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
What book or movie would you recommend and why?
Hi everyone, Iām Danny. Iām the solidity developer and blockchain integrator working here at Vega. Iāve been in this field for a while and am honored to be a member of such an accomplished team of talented people.
-What book or movie would you recommend and why?
Everyone here should probably read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Itās about currency and cryptography and stores of value. Itās well researched and, having been published in 1999, predated cryptocurrency by a while.
-Favourite crypto meme?
Hey! My name is Candida, and I manage the content & social media at Vega, so youāll probably see a lot blog posts with my name on them.
What brings you here?
Iām here to learn more about our community members, talk about what weāve been up to and get some reading recommendations.
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
Iād love to visit the Bobās Burgers world, so I could try the āI Fought the Slaw (And the Slaw Won)ā burger. ā¦and maybe steal Louiseās bunny ears.
Witold here, Iām working at Vega as a Quant.
Really excited to be able to join this project: not just because of itās potential to shake the ancien rĆ©gime of financial services and make them more accessible, but also because itās being looked after by a relatively small team full of amazing people backed by a growing community of sympathizers.
Whatās your dream use case of Vega?
Favourite crypto meme?
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
What book or movie would you recommend and why?
Happy to be asked about anything related to mathematical finance (or anything else for that matter): will do my best to provide a clear and accessible explanation or start a discussion with someone better placed to answer it.
What brings you here?
Whatās your dream use case of Vega?
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
Please say hi if you are doing User-centered design in the De-fi space.
What brings you here?
I work on the trading interface and designing the GraphQL API with @michael & @matt. Weāre aiming to provide a flexible, powerful user interface for trading, exploring the network and other related activities.
Unofficially, Iām also the official GameBoy photographer for the team. If you see me at a conference and need a new profile photo, just ask - I probably have a GameBoy Camera in my bag.
What book or movie would you recommend and why?
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Book or film, pick your preference, both are great - and thatās down to Chandlerās word-perfect dialogue
Hiya all, Iām Tamlyn, one of the early crew here at Vega. My professional background is trading electricity (+gas, coal, weather) derivatives and at Vega I help to shape the protocolās mechanism design. The opportunities and implications of Vega bend my mind continuously and Iām hugely looking forward to engaging with you all on that. Iām sure you have ideas I cannot even start to have imagined.
What brings me here?
Ramsey and I worked together on some of his previous projects. When he first pitched the idea of Vega to me the daringness of it struck me instantly. Could margined markets actually run without the onerous abundance of intermediation I was used to from my capital markets days? What would this imply in terms of shifting the existent power structures around access to financial markets? How could this actually work? Iāve not looked back since joining Ramsey, Barney and the rest of the team in our ongoing mission to figure all this out.
Book Iād recommend
Iām currently reading Snowdenās āPermanent Recordāā¦ what a guy. I would read it just 'cos i admire him but itās also pretty well written IMHO.
Favourite meme
because all the best trading advice can be found in pokerā¦
Hey!
Iām Christina and am your designated go to for the Vega community. My background is a mix of philosophy (analytic by education, continental by heart), psychology, early stage start-ups and mental health tech. Between the psychological nature of markets, game theory, collective intelligence and ability to work with tech capable of causing widespread systemic change this weird and wonderful parallel universe seemed like the perfect fit.
My Vega dreams are far beyond the scope of the character limit here but in the near future I would love a futures markets for community-made Vega merch 
My booklist is never ending but Iād like to recommend is the book released from Enspiral called Better Work Together. Itās a must read for anyone.
Tangentially Iām also going to add this article by Ian Hacking as itās one of my all time favs doesnāt have the wide spread credit it truly deserves https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/ian-hacking/making-up-people
If you ever have a burning question, crucial feedback or just want to chat please feel free to message me here, twitter @rudcn or telegram c_hristina
Ciao all, I do sysadmin and devops for Vega. Iām interested in all things related to Linux, continuous integration pipelines, automation, docker containerisation, monitoring and charting metrics.
Favourite crypto meme?
I like anything with Philip J Fry shouting āShut up and take my moneyā.
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
Iād like to see this world, a few millenia in the future.
What books would you recommend?
I like the classics: 1984, Brave New World, Paper Eater, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Hello Everyone,
My name is David. Iāve been with Vega for a while thinking mainly about various aspects of financial risk and how design a safe pseudonymous protocol that trades in promises (derivatives) together with @tamlyn and @barney. Results of this are the margin mechanism and the risk engine design together with the early risk models that we have implemented. Other Vega related things that keep me busy are the liquidity incentives for market makers and mechanism design in general. A fair part of this is covered in the white paper.
In my other life I do research at University of Edinburgh School of Mathematics and some teaching (mainly stochastics and mathematical finance).
What brings me here?
My connection to Vega is from one of my previous jobs when I worked as a fixed income quantā¦ and one of my colleagues knew George from his PhD days at Cambridgeā¦ thatās the āhowā. As for the āwhyā: when @barney, @tamlyn, @ramsey pitched the Vega vision to me I thought: interesting, this might just about work. But it wonāt be easy and there will be a lot of interesting research questions arising from this. Weāve solved some, some have motivated my academic research in particular in relation to machine learning and some are work in progress. But the point is that working with Vega is super exciting.
Dream use case of Vega?
Anything that helps people or companies get on with their lives (core business) more easily than they could before: be it easily traded weather insurance, FX futures for holidaysā¦ anything where the user wonāt even know that there is āVega protocolā behind what they are doing in the same way that most people donāt know that there is something called TCP/IP running the internet.
Book Iād recommend
Well, Hullās āOptions, Futures and Other Derivativesā is always a good start, then there is Karatzasā and Shreveās āBrownian Motion and Stochastic Calculusāā¦ but jokes aside if we are talking about reading just for fun then Iām a big fan of Terry Pratchet (Mort is probably the favourite), Ursula K. Le Guinās books are great (The Left Hand of Darkness)ā¦
Favourite meme
Not sureā¦ Iām not really up to speed when in comes to crypto (or any other) memes.
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
Hard to sayā¦ Discworld would be fun I suppose but some characters there have very short and unpleasant life spans. The Earth of āFuturamaā i.e. 1000 years and the future here, but with Zoidberg and Bender. Good news everyoneā¦
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is great! Iām currently reading it too!
Hi Everyone,
Iām one of the founders of Vega. My focus is mostly on making sure thereās enough fuel in the tank and that conditions are good to achieve our ambitions
What brings you here?
Iāve spent much of my life working in technology and building companies. A few years ago during some downtime I took a closer look at the decentralised systems being built and was curious about how they might impact the tech space and society in general. Thatās also about the time I met my co-founder @barney. He really helped me get my head around some of the the more difficult concepts and he happened to be an awesome guy! And here I am 
Whatās your dream use case of Vega?
Iām excited about the explosion of creativity and innovation that our protocol will support
Favourite crypto meme?
Sorry I donāt have one
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
Still squeezing the juice out of this one!
What book or movie would you recommend and why?
Book - Nelson Mandelaās autobiography Long Walk To Freedom is incredible and touching
Movie - Alien vs Predator, I assume itās obvious why
Hi everyone! Iām Barney 
Iām a bit of a Vega fanboy, and at least partly responsible for the design of the protocol. Iām mostly here for the neon yellow swag though.
Stavro Mueller Beta or Planet Wormulon.
Book: Can I have a whole trilogy? Yes? Ok: William Gibsonās Bridge trilogy. How about two trilogies? Cool, add his Sprawl trilogy to that. I can have more? Cool, everything by Neal Stephenson but particularly Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicon.
Why? These are textbooks to the future, theyāre incredibly well written, brilliant books, unbelievably prescient, and I donāt know how anyone can think about the future or design new tech without having read them (and really a whole ton more sci-fi).
Movie: Apollo 11 (2019) is probably the best movie of at least the last 5 years. Yes I know itās a documentary. Still though. The best movie ever is Demolition Man (only half joking.)
Hey everyone, Iām Daigan 
- What brings you here?
As an LSE student, former President of our Blockchain Society, and current Executive Director of London Blockchain Labs, I ran into Vega a while ago and ended up sticking around because I was such a fan of the company. We even collaborated on the community-focused āDeconstructing DeFiā as part of London Blockchain Week back in March (pre-Covid 
)
Iāll be interning here for the next couple of months and youāll be able to catch me on the forums building up a storm and anywhere else Vega has an online presence! 
- Whatās your dream use case of Vega?
Iād love to see Vega leading the transition away from traditional market structures, setting protocol standards and creating frameworks for future firms to follow.
- Favourite crypto meme?
- What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
Obviously Satoshiās house 
- What book or movie would you recommend and why?
Iām currently reading Nasim Talebās āThe Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbableā.
Taleb takes the reader through a journey of how the unexpected/improbable define and shape our civilisation more so than any other single entity. Iām half-way through but I would 100% recommend the book (so far).
@Daig so great to have you here! And I am shamed by the fact you have done a profile before me! Well done 
@Daig Black Swan is a good book ā¦ It is also one of @dannyās favourites ā¦ so I know that he would be up for a natter and @Ashley has just started the Vega Bookclub so you might be able to get on that agenda ā¦ Iāll totally do a Nasim day at Vega.
Iām an active member of DeFi community (Iāve helped setting up and admin large communities for decentralised exchanges), a crypto researcher, and a writer (Twitter link here). I featured Vega in one of my essays about āthe next wave of decentralised exchangesā (link here). Currently working on series of crypto related articles for UKās āMoneyā magazine.
Much like the web, that was initially catering to a privileged few, DeFiās benefits will pass on to an entire generation of under-served consumers who may never had access to more advanced financial products (like derivatives trading on Vega Console).
āZero to oneā by Peter Thiel but I am sure most of you know this one already
