Spotlight on Technical Standards Committee Member, Alex Fauvel
The Technical Standards Committee (TSC) is currently going through a recruitment campaign seeking up to four new members. To help you gauge whether you might be a good candidate, we take this opportunity to introduce you to the current members of the committee.
If you are interested in joining the TSC, please read the role description and information pack that you can find on the website carefully. Applications must be submitted no later than 9 March 2023 11.59pm UTC.
The first member in this series is Alex Fauvel, a founding member who is currently up for re-election. He also founded his own fund, Two Hop Ventures, which is dedicated to BSV enterprises. In the interview he gave us insights about his own professional background, his BSV origin story and of course about the work on technical standards.
Background in Bitcoin and blockchain
Alex Fauvel’s career in the blockchain space begins in a managing role for a fund that invested into digital assets. At the time, the fund held an unwieldy amount of over 100 digital assets in its portfolio. In the course of this work, he realised that the promises made by most blockchain projects in their white papers cannot be implemented in reality and, in most cases, are doomed to fail due to computational technicalities.
Through this experience, Fauvel recognized the technical brilliance of Bitcoin. He emphasises the following qualities of Bitcoin:
‘For me what the genius behind Bitcoin was, the fact that it’s public, and it uses proof-of-work. It allows it to scale and be traceable as money, which is something that no other blockchain can really do. The scaling issue is actually really solved in Bitcoin because of its UTXO and Merkle tree model. It’s purely an architectural thing.’
Another advantage of BSV over other blockchains, he highlights, is the fact that the protocol is set in stone. It makes the network reliable and developers and entrepreneurs can rely on the protocol to remain as a permanent fundament for their own applications. His conviction of Bitcoin SV as a world changing technology has led him also to founding his own fund dedicated to enterprises and start-ups in the BSV ecosystem.
Qualifications for Technical Standardisation
Fauvel explains that the work at the Fund and the TSC are basically comparable, insofar as he fills a managerial role at both organisations. The roles require soft skills like intuition or to manage people and help a team move forward on roadmap goals. His job at the Fund requires, however, more analytical skills to determine whether a particular business model is viable and whether Bitcoin infrastructure can accommodate it.
Through his multifaceted work at the Fund, he gains insight into the most common problems between businesses, which enables him to better understand the standards needed and allows him to point the committee to problems that have yet to be addressed.
Work at the TSC
Fauvel is in fact a founding member of the TSC. He recalls that the Committee was founded out of necessity. As people in the industry quickly realised that they were working on the same problems, but came up with different solutions. It would be better if they had a platform at which they could cooperate and work on a common solution:
‘So instead of inventing the wheel five different times in different ways, it would be best if we had a place for people to collaborate on their solutions and then effectively publish what we think is the best solution.’
Basically, this also reflects the mandate of the TSC to this day. Contrary to what the name of the committee might suggest, it does not act as an authority that dictates what standards need to be used in the industry. Rather, it is a cooperative platform for the industry to work on standards. Therefore, players in the industry are also free to submit standards, which the TSC will put through their processes of reviewing, documenting, approving and finally publishing after a public review.
Re-election in the current member recruitment campaign
As his current four-year term has expired, Fauvel is also up for re-election in the current Member recruitment campaign, which closes on March 9, 2023 11.59pm UTC. For new members, he would be happy to have colleagues who bring industry experience in particular. From Fauvel’s point of view, members who come from outside the BSV ecosystem with insight into technical necessities and an educational platform, would be especially valuable to the ecosystem as a whole.
Interested in becoming a TSC member? Here is how you can apply
If you are interested in becoming a member of the TSC yourself, you can apply using the application form available on the TSC’s official website on the recruitment campaign. The deadline for applications is March 9, 2023, 11.59pm and those who are selected to progress to the next stage will be asked to join a short online interview with the nominating committee. A second round of interviews may also be held at the committee’s discretion, with applicants being notified of the outcome within seven days following the interview.
If you are interested in joining the TSC, please read the role description and information pack that you can find on the website carefully. Applications must be submitted no later than 9 March 2023 11.59pm UTC. The TSC is looking forward to receiving your application!
