Only 25 years old, Marlon has a vision and believes in the power of simplifying complex things to make a difference in people's lives
I’ve never been the one to drool over prodigies’ stories. Being able to work with one of them is really something special.
Marlon Gomes, our Head of Software Architecture, is an example of a prodigy!
In his 25 years, Marlon is ahead of the game, not just because he's smart (because he is), but also because he works hard to make a difference with Klever's products and make people's lives easier through the best solutions.
Let’s get to know him more.
1- Maluh: So, Marlon, we can’t talk about you without acknowledging the fact that you are 25 and already a successful entrepreneur, co-founder of Klever, and our Head of Software Architecture. I mean, this is incredible.
What do you attribute your success to?
Marlon: I believe that challenges make you evolve and grow fast.
If you see a challenge, don't worry about how hard it will be to overcome it. Instead, prepare and jump in - after solving it, you will be transformed as a person.
Since I was a kid (perhaps not so long ago), I struggled day after day to find my place in the world.
Born and raised in a Favela from Rio de Janeiro, I’ve learned that life can be hard enough to kill your dreams before they even come to light if you accept your fate.
2- Maluh: One can only imagine that you always drew some kind of attention from your family, teachers, or friends. Is this correct? Tell us a little bit about your journey until Klever.
Marlon: My academic record is not the best, but I have a natural ability to learn.
I always attempted to hack the knowledge and used to think that sitting in a school chair for 5-6 hours a day would not make me learn faster than studying at home.
Meanwhile, tech stuff always got my attention. I remember the day a neighbor gave me and my older brother an Intel 486 Desktop - it was one of the happiest days in our childhood.
Using it to run an Atari emulator placing a ROM on each floppy disk due to an only 128MB of hard disk was awesome. A spark was ignited which led to my brother and me becoming more knowledgeable about computers.
From this point on, I have been surrounded by a lot of great teachers, starting with my older brother, and then at the age of 17, meeting Dio, David, Baiano, and Vitor and now we have hundreds of collaborators at Klever who teach me something new every day.
3- Maluh: You are one of our co-founders. Can you tell us something about the very beginning of the company?
Marlon: At the beginning, we had to pay to work. Since the beginning, we had the dream of creating a company that we would be proud to work on, so we shared our savings every month to pay for the servers, tools, and everything else we needed to use.
At that time, It used to take four hours and three buses to arrive at Dio's house, where our headquarters were located.
My computer was a 4GB RAM and Celeron processor notebook not able to open a code editor, a terminal, and a browser altogether.
At this time, we learned a lot about how to be efficient using a small team, limited resources, and still great quality products.
Seeing what Klever is to the community and how many great products we have built so far makes me happy. But for all of us, it is still day zero, like we used to say. It's just the beginning.
4- Maluh: As a co-founder, you must be very proud of our achievements as a company. How do you see this growth in Klever?
Marlon: It’s amazing!
When we see the numbers about the adoption of our Klever Wallet, about the usage of the internal components like Swap, Buy Crypto, Travala integration, we get hyped.
The way we have made 4 versions of a Wallet (with the 5th version on the way), an Exchange, creating a Blockchain, a multi-chain NFT platform, and a hardware wallet in only three years is insane!
Looking at the Klever Team even as a person into the business seems like we have a time capsule and we are making more and more every day.
This wouldn't be possible without our community partners, who are working to build Klever Ecosystem into a space for everyone, and their leadership always leads our products in the right direction.
5- Maluh: So, talking about your role in Klever: what are the main challenges of the Head of Software Architecture in a company such as ours that tries to make difficult things easier for the user?
Marlon: When you think about an ecosystem with such specific products getting together you have to think about how idempotent those microservices are and how they can connect together without creating a dependency on the other services.
As Head of Software Architecture, my primary responsibility is to turn the ideas about the problems that we want to solve into something real, reliable, available, and safe. I am responsible for following the standards of Klever about Software Architecture and making sure that product conception is always geared towards user needs.
6- Maluh: When we talk about our recent achievements, we can talk about the exchange and the launch of the blockchain’s testnet. Can you elaborate a little more on those topics? What were the goals you guys wanted to reach with those projects?
Marlon: At Klever Exchange, we have the goal to make the words “Trading is difficult, but it shouldn't be” something closer to our users every day. Together with the high performance of the autonomous order books, which can process up to 3 million transactions on each key pair, and the functionality of Klever Crypto banking, along with the ease of integration with Klever ID, many exciting things are coming to our ecosystem.
Our entire exchange environment is built with 100% Klever proprietary code, which means we know every line of code on our servers, and we are continually updating it.
We are currently developing the Klever NFT Platform and the Klever Pools, which are fully integrated with Klever ID and the Klever Exchange.
The Klever Blockchain is something that hit us as tech professionals straight in the heart because the way a blockchain essentially works is fascinating.
In addition, to create our own blockchain geared towards the user experience, allowing them to create safe functions inside the blockchain with ease is something that makes me, as a developer, very enthusiastic about creating Decentralized Applications.
We all know that it is not easy to create a smart contract, validate, audit, and follow all the security standards before going to mainnet and then still being able to sleep well after doing so, holding millions of an asset inside of it all.
So, with Klever Blockchain testnet launching, the beginning of a new era of decentralized applications is rising.
7- Maluh: The Hardware Wallet is closer than we think. What can users expect from it technology-wise?
Marlon: In my opinion, users will be surprised by the speed of transactions and how user-friendly they will be.
Our hardware wallet is the fastest in the market and uses Klever Wallet to provide a friendly and easy-to-use interface.
It also features a CC EAL5+ certified IC, which improves security and authenticity even more.
8- Maluh: Talking about our precious wallet - we have a new version coming soon. What can we say for the community about the improvements and updates on it?
Marlon: We are creating Klever 5 with a fully native solution to remove the restrictions we have been facing with past versions.
When you create a super app like Klever 5 with a lot of functionalities, you need to extract the maximum of the platform you are running.
With a complete new redesign, the Klever 5 will transform the way users will interact with the standard functionalities that were always there, making it easier and even faster.
A lot of integrations will be available with the next version, including more providers to Buy Crypto, new Blockchain Networks, Hardware Wallet integration, and more.
9- Maluh: The technology field is growing even more nowadays. We already see children starting in programming and technology-related careers are heating up in the market. Can you tell us about what Heads and Directors of those fields want from the prospects in this area of expertise and what makes them stand out in the crowd?
Marlon: I believe that this new generation will be able to come up with great solutions because of its ability to think outside the box and the sense of freedom it has.
That being said, the Heads and Directors want to see creativity combined with a good sense of result and consistency on daily deliverables, and it is a mission of those leaders to make those professionals feel and really be part of the company that they are working with.
On the other side, the Heads and Directors from all generations must be able to evolve their way of thinking to not have an obsolete way of solving conflicts or even an obsolete culture.
To stand out in the crowd I believe that alongside commitment, self-development, and ownership behavior, the professional must aim for the abstraction of all concepts he used to see to not get caged by a programming language, or a stack, or anything.
10- “Crypto is difficult, but it shouldn’t be”. How can we make sure that Klever stays on that path for the next few years?
Marlon: You know, when we wake up every morning we think about this phrase and how we can make the world a place where crypto is made simpler.
We want to change the way people interact with crypto and we cannot do it by creating barriers. The only way to reach this is with really useful applications and with the feedback and support of our community.
Maluh Bastos
Klever Writer