In 2014 I joined Tembusu Systems who built and deployed the first Bitcoin ATMs in Asia. The company pivoted to fork ripple and add privacy enhancements.
I started messing with ethereum in late 2015, working with the blockchain by hooking into the GETH client. From there I joined HelloGold in Malaysia to develop their blockchain capabilities.
Called upon by many people to help with smart contracts or blockchain interaction, I have ended up consulting to a number of organisations and maintain technical positions in a few of them.
I am currently a co founder of Galaxis (formerly Ether Cards) building smart contracts.
Blogs, talks and stuff
I have always been a teacher, a mentor to people who worked with me and the public at large.
I ran pascal classes from the Singapore Microcomputer Society way back in the 80’s and led a
non-Microsoft Interest group (I had an Amiga and a CP/M machine).
Discovering the Singapore Hackerspace in 2010 I started teaching Arduino and Raspberry Pi classes
leading up to a series of talks at GeekcampSG
I also wrote technical articles on Kauri.io (sadly deceased)
My early series on medium about multi sig wallets was so well received that I got a good consulting role from it.
While working in Kuala Lumpur with HelloGold, we teamed up with Etherscan to start Ethereum Malaysia. I presented quite a few technical presentations there including live coding sessions.
Programming things
As a schoolboy in the late 60’s I used to get into a lot of trouble. My form teacher suggested that I might like to join the new computer club that was run by Brian Barker, one of the physics teachers, a graduate from Imperial College. Brian had managed to borrow a load of IBM hand punches to allow us to create our programs on IBM card decks. So I started programming Fortran IV using these templates and a little pointy thing to push out the cardboard holes.
Since then I have programmed computers of all sizes from a CDC supercomputer in my days at Imperial College down to the smallest microcontrollers and most points in between.
I have programmed in micro-code in ECL test computer cores, machine code, numerous assembly languages and a lot of high level and domain specific languages. I even designed an Arithmentic Logic Unit from standard TTL chips.
From the mid ’80s through to about 2012 I spent much of my time designing and building automatic test equipment. Over the years I designed systems to test integrated circuits, inspect electronic connectors and medical vessels as well as for use in calibration and testing labs. Some of these systems had custom languages and self learning features.
About Dave Appleton
I am a software engineer living in Malaysia.
I started programming in 1968 when one of my school teachers suggested that I join a computer club to keep me out of trouble.
It obviously didn’t work because a few years later the university threatened to revoke my computer access for hacking the accounts of postgrad students in order to get extra time to play Adventure.
I started working in a mainframe company evaluating memory circuits. Two years later I used that experience to secure a job at Fairchild Semiconductor in Singapore.
I have designed and built scientific and test systems for calibration labs and production facilities.
Forty years on I program Ethereum blockchain applications in Go and Solidity.
I was recruited into blockchain in 2014 by Andras Kristof.
Although we officially went our own ways in late 2015, we continued to collaborate.
In 2018 Andras bought Ether Cards from Nick Johnson (the founder of the Ethereum Name Service) and we attempted to expand its business from the original ethereum gift cards to tagging items with NFC tags which linked them to NFTs. We presented the idea at
Tachyon in 2019 but didn’t get much traction with the idea.
We also built a novel auction and raffle system for tickets for Devcon Osaka, again representing the tickets as NFTs.
Throughout 2020 we were trying to build an accredited education platform with on chain certifications with grants from the Ethereum Foundation. The certificates were to represented as NFTs. The idea was to get investors to fund the production of courses but we were finding it hard to create a good business model.
Andras created an amazing load of incentives that could be given to investors in the project - but he didn’t have a delivery mechanism. At the same time I was playing around with a few ideas I had for what I called “NFTs with properties”. At one of our weekly zoom calls (we were in different countries and the pandemic was in full fling) I mentioned this to him and something clicked.
Another idea - what I called “jigsaw puzzles” - was stashed it way for a while only to be resurrected as sticker books.
A month or so later he arrived with a fully fledged road map for the Ether Cards NFT drop - to build a platform to help people build and monetise communities to support projects that may have difficulty in raising funds, especially public goods like our former education project.
The funds raised have empowered the development of what can only be described as an incredible merging of blockchain and enterprise computing due for release in the incredibly near future (written 1st Sept 2023).
During the develpment it became clear that the future was multi chain so Ether Cards rebranded as Galaxis to make it clear that we are working on muliple chains with considerable investment in cross chain technology.
