Anton Bukov Verified Profile: Anton Bukov has verified to CryptoSlate that all details in this profile are accurate as of the date submitted.

Anton started programming at the age of 12 by attending evening university classes for school children. Anton took further programming classes in Turbo Pascal and C++ at a high school specializing in mathematics and computer science, and then studied cryptography at the university.

After graduating, he worked as a C++/C#/SQL developer for about five years before moving into iOS development for another five years.

Anton’s first introduction to crypto was around 2014-2015, when he was tasked with programming a spatial arbitrage bot for an exchange. This was his first experience with blockchain technology. The bot went well, but it turned out that it couldn’t make money because there was a constant price difference between two exchanges, which prevented any arbitrage trading.

On his second journey into the blockchain space, Anton was more interested in smart contracts. In August 2017, he participated in a hackathon in Kazan, which was attended by the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. At the hackathon, Anton wrote what he said was “probably the most complicated smart contract of his career to date”, which further sparked his interest in smart contracts. This project/dApp was later launched under the name 1Address.

The interest in smart contracts led Anton to a number of crypto startups, including one called MultiToken, but none of them really took off. Around the same time, a mutual friend introduced Anton to Sergej Kunz, the future co-founder of the 1inch Network. At first they chatted online, and later Anton became a co-host on Sergej’s YouTube channel CryptoManiacs, which focused on live security audits of smart contracts.

Soon the two developers took their collaboration to a new level and began attending hackathons as the CryptoManiacs team. At the hackathons Anton and Sergej met some of the developers who later became the core team of 1inch. In about a year, they attended more than a dozen hackathons around the world, building exciting solutions, having fun, winning awards and networking.

Things culminated in New York in May 2019, when Sergej and Anton built a DEX aggregator solution – essentially an MVP for the future 1inch Aggregation Protocol. Ironically, it turned out to be one of the least successful hackathons for the two developers in terms of awards.

• 1inch Network Co-founder, Lead Software Engineer & Architect