From Crypto Self-Custody to Music Rights, This Mother-Daughter Dev Team Does It All

Developer Cindy Zimmerman and her mom Judy Katzman are among the many cryptocurrency neighborhood’s most quietly prolific builders.

After studying about bitcoin in 2011, Katzman labored for the early change BitInstant and Zimmerman moved to Panama in 2012 to work with Erik Voorhees and the opposite founders behind the crypto change Coinapult. As a result of Zimmerman earned a part of her wage in crypto, as much as 50 p.c on the peak, she shortly realized the necessity for money on-and-off ramps.

“There have been a considerable amount of immigrants dwelling in Panama that needed to ship a reimbursement to Venezuela,” Zimmerman mentioned. “It’s laborious to stay off bitcoin. It’s doable, but it surely’s laborious. Understanding the place a bitcoin ATM is … is safer than assembly somebody in a park.”

So she constructed one of many first ATM networks in Panama, 5 machines in complete, which she operated till 2016, and freelanced for firms just like the bitcoin ATM producer Lamassu. 

In the meantime, within the U.S., her mother Katzman was additionally accepting a partial bitcoin wage and dealing with BitcoinStore, one of many first electronics shops to just accept bitcoin. 

The household skilled some ache factors transacting throughout borders throughout Zimmerman’s time in Panama, but it surely taught them how you can incorporate bitcoin into their every day lives. Then Zimmerman returned to New York in 2019, after years of freelancing for varied crypto initiatives like Sprint in Latin America, to launch her personal crypto safety startup referred to as KeyFi. 

“It’s a self-custody platform,” she mentioned, describing KeyFi’s multisig setup. “They [clients] are going to have the ability to management maintain their very own keys and pool along with different individuals.” 

Along with launching a startup, she’s additionally freelancing together with her mother. Each ladies are blockchain consultants for the 25-year-old software program growth firm AxisPoint, which is constructing a royalties administration platform for music business purchasers like Warner Music and EMI. 

“It will give music artists accountability for his or her revenue,” Katzman mentioned of the undertaking, referred to as RYTbox. 

AxisPoint CEO Dan DiSano mentioned the corporate already earns 10 p.c of its revenue from blockchain initiatives, and expects choices like RYTbox to account for 50 p.c of its revenue by late 2020. 

These ladies opted to find out about bitcoin by working within the business and managing elements of their family budgets with it. 

Zimmerman mentioned she hasn’t contributed to Bitcoin Core as a result of engaged on a undertaking with a lot worth, and scant company controls, carries a whole lot of stress. That’s to not say she lacks ambition or belief within the community. She merely prefers to earn bitcoin whereas coding for conventional firms. 

“You’re speaking about massive purchasers which have zero thought who I’m, like Beyonce, even that to a point is a whole lot of stress since you’re coping with some huge cash,” Zimmerman mentioned. “The quantity of stress that goes into writing that code is already very, very excessive.”

Most freelance purchasers, like AxisPoint, want to pay her in fiat. However, maybe counterintuitively, she mentioned it’s simpler to persuade purchasers to pay her in varied cryptocurrencies when the worth rises and boosts business optimism together with it. 

Whereas the youthful Zimmerman is the token-curious cypherpunk within the household – utilizing KeyFi to discover her obsession with the true person experiences associated to self-custody – Katzman mentioned she prefers to give attention to enterprise use instances like AxisPoint’s purchasers. That makes Katzman an anomaly amongst technologists who lived by the dot-com crash. 

She described blockchain know-how as nonetheless at a “technical” degree of growth, with much less widespread influence than earlier tech hype cycles. She believes as soon as initiatives like KeyFi make safety tradeoffs simpler to handle, then the true growth will start. So far as Katzman is anxious, the token growth of 2017 was solely the start. 

“It is essential to fail in addition to succeed,” she mentioned. “Failure helps in your future successes, together with investing in a coin or undertaking that does not rise to the moon.”