previous person
| Category | Tech |
| Alma mater | Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law |
| Known for | Steemit, Koinos Group |
Biography:
Educated as a lawyer at Villanova University, Andrew Levine was the general counsel for a real estate firm in New York for six years before shifting his career toward crypto and blockchain. He was one of the earlier entrants to the industry when he founded GiverHub in 2012, one of the first platforms to accept crypto donations for nonprofit organizations. Levine currently works as CEO of Koinos Group.
Levine’s 2020:
Levine started the pre-pandemic months of 2020 by resigning his position at blockchain-based social media platform Steemit, where he had served as head of communications and advocacy for more than a year. The resignation was directly in response to Tron, founded by Justin Sun, purchasing the firm in February and potentially leaving the decentralized project at risk of a centralized takeover.
The entrepreneur didn’t sit on his hands for too long, though, founding OpenOrchard with six developers who also left Steemit in response to the acquisition. The blockchain firm, intended to build innovative open-source technologies on top of Hive, was later rebranded as the Koinos Group and is currently behind the management of the Koinos blockchain.
The new blockchain is notable for its ‘modular upgradeability’, which Levine and his team are adamant is a necessary evolutionary step for blockchain technology. The purpose of the feature is to eliminate the need for hard forks.
Levine’s 2021:
The Koinos Group is still developing amid greater demand for digital privacy and many looking to blockchain technology for solutions. As with the founders behind the Ethereum blockchain, Levine is hoping to have a network appealing to developers looking to create applications, to drive home the message that blockchain can “touch every corner of the technology space.”
As part of these efforts, the firm has already started the process of launching the Koinos mainnet, most recently making its native token, Koin, mineable in the fourth quarter of 2020. The Koinos Group intends to complete the development of the Koinos blockchain framework in the first quarter of 2021 before launching the testnet in the second quarter and eventually the mainnet in the fourth.
Along with his team, Levine plans to make Koinos a “fast and fee-less” blockchain that allows developers to create as many accounts as needed for users. The blockchain will reportedly address issues related to scalability, allow management to add features without impacting any other part of Koinos, and remove unused data from the blockchain while retaining the ability to bring it back — a feature Koinos refers to as “state paging.”