The MESG Origin Story

2015 MESG was born out of a passion for experimentation, the excitement of discovering the most effective tools, and a strong aversion to busy work. When co-founders Anthony Estebe and Nicolas Mahe met, they immediately found common ground through a shared passion for programming tools and frameworks that help optimize the development process. Efficiency, after all, affords developers with more time for creativity and innovation. The two developer entrepreneurs were working on their respective startups when they first met in Thailand in 2015: Nicolas on a crypto portfolio app, and Anthony on a SaaS e-commerce product similar to Shopify, but aimed at the French market. Nicolas Mahé, CTO and Co-founder of MESG 2016 Looking into the future, Anthony saw looming issue of scaling his product. A growing user base meant he would need more servers, resulting in increased overhead. So, when he met with Nicolas, who had a strong interest in peer-to-peer technology, the two began to look into Ethereum Smart Contracts for their ability to decentralize application processing. Anthony saw its potential to eventually solve this scalability issue, as each new user of decentralized apps can theoretically add additional processing power to the network. Eager to get acquainted with an exciting new technology with massive potential, Nicolas began experimenting with creating decentralized apps using Ethereum smart contracts. One of the first DApps he created utilized Ethereum to make a system for voting and poll creation. With the available tools on the market such as Infura, he found that processing speed was cripplingly slow, which couldn’t yield to the good user experience they were seeking. Anthony Estebe, CEO and Co-founder of MESG 2017 The speed problem motivated Anthony and Nicolas to look for alternatives. The first alternative they discovered involved the deployment of an Ethereum node for each DApp to increase efficiency. So they created a solution called Etherstellar which allowed for the quick deployment of an Ethereum node in the cloud from an Ethereum Smart Contract, complete with an email notification to let users know that their cloud server was deployed and ready to use. But in order to complete Etherstellar, they needed a good way for Ethereum to connect efficiently to the outside world. Web services would provide them with functionalities that users expected in apps like email notifications, database storage, machine learning algorithms and in-app purchases. At this point, they both knew decentralized apps and web services well, but were surprised to find there was no solution on the market which allowed the two to work together. To help with this, they used their deep understanding of inner workings of Ethereum to create an application they called EthHook, which listened to events on the Ethereum network. They soon realized that listening to the blockchain was way more interesting than managing an entire Ethereum node. With no direct connection to Ethereum, and rather focusing on listening to events on Ethereum, they could create an application that connects to the outside world. EthHook used Ethereum as the source of events, then connected those events to email and other services from AWS Lambda. The exciting opportunity of connecting Ethereum to the outside world made the two essentially forget about their initial drive to build Etherstellar, and put all of their focus into creating a dashboard for EthHook, similar to IFTTT or Zapier, that connected events to tasks. They populated the dashboard with a few initial services like Ethereum, a webhook and an email service. In early 2017, Nicolas and Anthony met with Alexis Sirkia, who was immediately impressed with their work and expertise in the blockchain space. Alexis was a co-founder of GSR, one of the largest cryptocurrency market makers, and he wanted to have their expertise on his project. Nicolas agreed to join GSR at a later date but Anthony resisted, heart-set on success and busy working on his new project. In an effort to encourage and solidify Nicolas’s work on GSR, Alexis unexpectedly presented him with a new MacBook to help with his company. He accepted the gesture and began working for GSR earlier than expected, knowing that Alexis was very supportive of their project and that it’d be a good idea to keep him close so he could get better acquainted with their project and its value. Around the time Nicolas joined GSR, he and Anthony presented Alexis with their dashboard for EthHook. Alexis was so impressed by what they had accomplished, immediately seeing its massive implications, so he provided some good-faith funding for Anthony to begin working full time on the project while Nicolas continued to help on GSR. Alexis Sirkia, Co-founder of MESG 2018 The partnership between the three was legalized, including a repartition of shares and an initial seed investment of $500k from Alexis. Soon thereafter, Nicolas and Anthony began working on a concept to decentralize their event-based EthHook concept, with a deep focus on experimenting with the best available technologies and methods to build a decentralized platform which allowed any technology to connect to any other technology through their events. The app built through the EthHook experiment was ultimately successful. They took what they learned from EthHook and combined it with added findings from their experimentation to build what is known now as MESG Core. Early into 2018, they had completed an early version. Armed with a ready-to-use product, Nicolas stopped his work with GSR and joined Anthony, working full time on building out MESG. Throughout 2018, MESG expanded its team, hiring its first two employees in early 2018, then another four later in the year. Then, in late 2018, MESG joined the Yellow Incubator for their support and marketing expertise. 2019 Starting off the new year with a bang, MESG began with a major push into the creation of groundbreaking apps on MESG, as well as the launch of the MESG Token, and our first online hackathon in January. January 18th to February 17thWithin the first quarter of 2019, we’ll be launching the web-based UI for the MESG Marketplace. We are greatly looking forward to this launch, as it will help provide massive utility and earning potential for developers. MESG was founded on the principle of using the best ideas available from across the industry, combined into a single product. Now, it’s up to you. MESG is all about leaving the busy work behind, getting creative, and building apps featuring any feature from any technology. Start building on MESG today. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.