A holder of a degree in Psychology Science, which essentially emphases data over people, enabled Josh Hardy to meet fellow co-founder, David Mesiter, at university in Melbourne, Australia. They started a business making websites which pushed Hardy into coding – a surprisingly enjoyable experience for him – and they also formed a band.
The band featured mostly electronic music with Hardy playing keyboard. His music took him first to Berlin from his native Melbourne and then to London. While still in Australia, Mesiter was dabbling with Bitcoin mining, which only really interested Hardy after he decided he was not going to earn fame and fortune through his music, or rather he wondered if he could crowdfund using cryptocurrencies. He asked Meister if he wanted to help build something and his reply was a firm no.
“David told me to go and learn for myself how to build a platform – and this reply and approach has formed the core of Rainlang.”
Hardy taught himself how to code using Solidity, and started building. Mesiter was impressed with his work and invited him to join the core team at Rainlang.
“Rainlang does not underestimate people’s capacity for doing things. If we can lower the bar for people to be able to do the stuff for themselves, then people will be able to do more without sacrificing their sovereignty or security.”
Rainlang is a smart contract language designed to be easier to read and to write than transitional smart contracts. The goal of the platform is to create smart contracts for people who might not have considered themselves to be technical, thereby reducing the reliance on developers. People who can understand and work with Excel Sheets might not consider themselves programmers but using Rainlang they can programme easily.
“People might think – oh I’m an accountant or a manager in a financial firm – but now they can programme like a pro. Our goal is to target that audience and allow them to also function as devs.”
Rainlang is not limited to just apps, but pushes further on the programmable money concepts, allowing smart contracts to exist between people. Raindex is one of the first projects using the Rainlang platform and language.
Raindex enables people to write trading strategies on chain. Typically trading strategies operate on fixed curves where x times y = k.
“What if we allowed people to write a curve in a very simple contract that is as transparent as an Excel formula? That allows people to define their own curves, using indexes, to write an algorithm that expresses the trades they are willing to make.”
The relationship between Rainlang and Flare came about through personal connections and shared values. Max Luck, Head of Growth with Flare and Hardy have a shared background in music. Over time, Hardy got to learn about the variety of decentralized data available to developers via the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO) and it made perfect sense.
“This in turn increases the audience for the FTSO to a much broader base – basically anyone who wants to write a strategy.”
In order to encourage people to test the Raindex, Rainlang has launched a trading competition with an overall prize fund of $12,000 of the Flare token. Despite the generous prize, there is no minimum amount to enter the competition.
There are other ideas in the pipeline too. Last year, Rainlang built a prototype of a supply chain finance system handling the multiple parties involved in the chain.
“There are lots of different variables and contracts in such a supply chain, but now the financial controller can read the contracts and they don’t need to understand Solidity or another coding language.”
Rainlang is also working on leveraging the app so that it works as a lending protocol where people can make agreements between each other about lending funds and strategies.
Rainlang likes to push people outside their comfort zone to show them how they can do better – any ideas of projects to use that premise should write to Josh Hardy directly. He’s open to suggestions.
