In 2013, I spent my holiday break building a GPU miner for a hilarious new cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. I fired it up for the first time on December 30th, 2013.

Terminal output from my Dogecoin miner’s first run. “Making Money.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a milestone for me. It was the first time I made money doing something in crypto¹, which by then, I’d been following for more than a year.

At the time, there wasn’t much of an “industry” around crypto. Outside of a few early companies, mining a meme coin with a Shiba Inu on its logo was about as sophisticated as it got. Times have changed!

More than six wild years since I built that Dogecoin miner, I’m excited to announce another milestone: ScopeLift is all in on crypto.

ScopeLift: High Caliber Crypto

Effective today, ScopeLift will focus solely on crypto projects. All new clients will be crypto companies, and we’ll be transitioning off our remaining non-blockchain projects in the coming months.

ScopeLift has always taken the craft of software engineering seriously. From this point forward, we’re devoting that expertise to helping our clients build the decentralized future.

This decision was far from obvious and not easy to make. In 2019, blockchain projects drove less than one-third of ScopeLift’s revenue, and the industry faces a number of headwinds right now: the market is in sideways, sentiment and morale are low, and there are serious questions about how crypto projects can be funded.²

Despite these challenges, I’m confident this is the right move for me and for ScopeLift. Here’s why.

1 — Life Is Too Short For Boring Work

Yes, there is good money to be made cranking out CRUD web apps, or stuffing the response from a few more JSON endpoints into yet-another iOS table view. But that’s boring!

The most interesting projects ScopeLift has worked on over the last two years have been crypto projects. The passion of people working in the crypto industry is palpable and energizing. Those are the people we want to work with. ScopeLift wants to help solve their problems.

2 — Crypto Will (Slowly) Change The World

Decentralized cryptonetworks have given us powerful primitives: digital scarcity, unstoppable code, and immutable data. Did we really expect something so fundamentally new to transform the world overnight?

It’s still hard to believe that mainstream financial outlets now talk about Bitcoin on a regular basis. Back in the days of home-built Dogecoin miners, such progress seemed impossible.

Truly mainstream adoption of these new tools will probably take decades. We’re ok with that, and we’re prepared to operate in that kind of timeframe.

3 – ScopeLift Has Something To Offer

Crypto is filled with brilliant people working on extremely hard problems. There is no lack of intelligence and creativity. Yet in a space that’s still maturing, and continues to have its share of growing pains, we believe ScopeLift has something valuable to offer: professional, senior-level software engineering, paired with an ability to understand the unique business contexts in which technical skills are being applied.

We have five years of experience at ScopeLift building high quality software for a wide variety of clients. We understand the craft of software and we’re passionate about the world of blockchain. From the lowest level technical bits, to the underrated-but-critical ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders, we have a proven track record.

Get In Touch

There is one simple way to judge ScopeLift’s success: do we help our clients push their projects forward? Above everything else, this is the metric that matters. That won’t change in 2020. Our success will be measured by the value we deliver to our clients.

What will change this year? Our hope is that those clients will be the awesome entrepreneurs and passionate creators that make the nascent crypto ecosystem what it is. Is that you? If so, get in touch. We’re chomping at the bit to help you build the decentralized future.

Let's Talk

¹ The Dogecoin miner ran non-stop for about six months, making at most $1 a day, not counting the electricity. I was occasionally selling my Doge for Bitcoin, which was smart. I left the Bitcoin sitting on an exchange, which was dumb. It got hacked, and I lost what was then a couple hundred bucks. Today it’d be worth a couple thousand. Still, a pretty low price to pay to learn a valuable lesson, I suppose.

² Of the projects that do have large capital reserves, many are those that ran dubious ICOs, needlessly flaunt regulations, or have otherwise questionable business practices. We refuse to work on those sorts of projects.