Seed Vault appoints Silicon Valley veteran as CTO to lead development of decentralised bot marketplace

Seed Vault Ltd, the open source software foundation using blockchain to create the world’s first independent bot economy, announced on March 6^th 2018, the appointment of veteran technologist Robert Nielson as Chief Technical Officer. Nielsen brings a wealth of experience in web and decentralised web development having held senior engineering positions at a host of leading internet companies including Coinbase, Google and Apple.

Based in San Francisco, Nielsen will lead Seed Vault’s team of core developers and work closely with its engineering partners to build the Seed Vault marketplace using the Ethereum blockchain.

According to Gartner, the bot market is forecast to grow from $3B today, to over $20B by 2022 as bots improve our lives in areas such as healthcare, financial services and travel. However, today’s bot tools and protocols remain proprietary and the market is dominated by a handful of internet giants. Seed Vault’s decentralised marketplace is underpinned by an open source bot development framework licensed from Botanic Technologies, which is already in use by Botanic’s corporate customers on Android, iOS, Skype, Signal and other clients. The framework combines with the SEED Token to provide the world’s only open source marketplace for developers building bots. A marketplace where each contribution made by a developer is automatically rewarded each time it is used.

As Nathan Shedroff, Executive Director, Seed Vault Ltd explains, Nielsen’s experience will be critical to driving change in the bot ecosystem, “Robert’s experience is ideal for building out SEED’s peer-to-peer ecosystem that helps bot developers innovate more rapidly, whilst ensuring bot interactions can be authenticated, managed and remunerated. Having someone of Robert’s experience lead our development is critical to building a marketplace that is as easy to use as the App Store, and one which helps establish conversational interfaces to AI systems that users can trust.”

Nielsen added, “Today bots are difficult to create and manage. Imagine trying to build out the web while developers at only a handful of companies have access to HTML, that’s the problem facing those building bots today. SEED’s plans for changing that are what drew me to the project. You can already see users beginning to adopt new conversational interfaces to interact with technology more naturally and if this is to continue developers need an open source bot framework as well as the market infrastructure to accompany it.” He continued: “Nathan and the team are highly experienced and we all believe deeply in pushing forward a fairer and more equitable bot future, one that isn’t dominated by today’s internet giants.”