🏗️Core Contributors

The core contributors for Astra projects are veterans in e-commerce, tech and blockchain industries. As we go through the challenges of scaling actual commerce, retail, marketplace, exchange businesses from developing technologies to acquire, retain customers (both brands/merchants and end consumers), we have first hand experience of the problems, the pain points and how to solve it. We are at the intersection of everyday commerce, retail businesses, consumer understanding and web2, web3 tech. That’s why the following core contributors are uniquely positioned to solve this customer retention problem that is worth hundreds of billions dollars.

Name (alphabetical order)	Background & contribution
Chinh Nguyen	SVP of Technology, Liquid, a leading global cryptocurrency platform that provides trading, exchange, and next generation financial services powered by blockchain technology. Recently acquired by FTX. Chinh contributes his expertise on how to build exchanges (both centralized and decentralized), setup validators, and optimize liquidity.
Hoa Nguyen Khanh	He built the core of Astra Chain, responsible for Astra Chain’s stability, security, and high-performance. He also contributes to building Explorer, Bridge, DApp. He has 8+ years of experience as a software engineer, blockchain engineer, and high-performance system. Before Astra He was a key member of Catalog Platform at TIKI, building up large-scale & high-performance product read/write. He was a Technical Lead at CryptoN3, where he built the NFT marketplace and game NFT He was a CTO at Knownetwork (https://knownetwork.io/), Knownetwork is a new blockchain platform with 2 layers.
Hoa Nguyen Manh	Senior Director at Tiki, responsible for designing the high level architecture of the e-commerce platform, building up large-scale & high-performance core systems, running devops teams to improve the stability & productivity for engineering in general. In the Astra project, he was responsible for building the exchange (CEX) to support trades between Tiki Xu & Astra. He also built Astra Hub, a non-custodial wallet that helps users to discover Astra in the web3 world. Before Tiki, he was a tech leader in Vega, where he built the clip.vn as the number 1 video sharing platform in Vietnam from 2006 to 2009.
Luan Do	More than 5 years working on blockchain technology including Ethereum, Avalanche, other EVM-based blockchains and Cosmos at Infinity Blockchain Labs as blockchain lead, I joined several projects to build products such as lottery, Defi protocols like Uniswap, Balancer. To make blockchain to mass adoption, real use-cases like loyalty or reward in e-commerce will definitely be an easier way to approach non-technical people who Astra has targeted. I would mainly focus on building a loyalty/reward platform to connect between partners and their customers, supporting them to flexibly issue reward tokens and handling the reward distribution in the Astra Chain. I would also lead the NFT marketplace that allows all customers to exchange tokens.
Max Hoang	Having worked in the digital user experience field for over 12 years, Max has a passion for building great products. He specializes in the tokenomic design, project management, product & business development. As a product-focused, committed to project success, Max is also a sought-after speaker in product management and blockchain/web3 communities.
Phu Tang	More than 10 years experience in software development and 3 years in Blockchain technology, Phu joined the Kardiachain team as a core contributor before joining Tiki. After that, he joined Tiki in 2019 as a Software Engineer working in various projects from logistics to shopping experience. Phu is working with Astra’s infrastructure and core chain solutions.
Son Tran	2 decades in building tech companies. He started Tiki with $5,000 as an online bookstore and grew it into a ~$900 millions dollars commerce infrastructure in Vietnam with Retail, Marketplace, integrated Logistics, and financial services. Son sets the vision and direction for Astra but also hands on with product development, talents, business model & development (bringing partners, validators, Reward Providers, developers and capital) for Astra network. Son earned a Master degree in Commerce (UNSW, Australia) and Bachelor degree in Software Engineering (Southern Cross University, Australia)
Thai Duong	Thai Duong is a security researcher, best known for his SSL attack trilogy: BEAST, CRIME, and POODLE. He was half of the team that discovered the crypto vulnerability in ASP.NET affecting millions of websites. For this work he was a recipient of the prestigious Pwnie Award. Currently Thai is a senior member of the worldwide product security team at Google, where he is leading a cryptography team that is in charge of Google Tink and Project Wycheproof.
Thinh Tran	He has more than 4 years working on blockchain technology including Bitcoin, EOS, Ethereum, Tron, Neo, Ontology, RootStock as blockchain engineer, with several projects such as non-custodial multi-crypto wallet, Defi protocols like Pancakeswap, tamper detection using Hyperledger Sawtooth, Fractional Real Estate marketplace, crypto exchange. In the Astra project, he was responsible for building dapp ecosystems including DEX, Lottery… Help users interact and experience easily with Astra Chain, as well as connect Tiki users with blockchain technology. Besides, he is also in charge of training new employees about blockchain.
Trung-Dung Tran	Received his Master and PhD in Computer Science from SUNY at Buffalo, and UT at Dallas in 2006 and 2010, respectively. His research focused on the line between computer networks and game theory. He has started studying blockchain technology since 2017. In early 2018, he joined the core team of Incognito blockchain project as a research coordinator. He made several contributions to blockchain field: Proposed the new approach of PBFT, named Multiview-PBFT, which in normal cases used only two phases to finalize a block while Tendermint required three phases in order to finalize a block. Proposed Dynamic Committee Size protocol which allows the system to rotate, increase, or decrease the committee members automatically.