Equilibrium

Equilibrium is a globally distributed company focused on designing, building and funding core infrastructure for the decentralised web.

We believe that our collective financial and social infrastructure should be open source, peer-to-peer and private by default. Our dream is to be able to fund development of decentralised infrastructure that reflects these values indefinitely. In pursuit of this, we use a number of strategies to generate revenue:

Projects - We design and build our own decentralised projects, such as Vanilla, a decentralised interface for DeFi. We also contribute as core developers to critical infrastructure such as Rust-IPFS, OrbitDB and Interledger-rs.

Services - We assist the most transformative projects and companies in designing and implementing their decentralised systems. To date we have worked with Protocol Labs, Web3 Foundation and the Zcash Foundation to name but a few.

Trading - We invest in important decentralised projects at all stages. We also passively deploy capital through lending and staking. Our investment activity serves to both support the projects we invest in, as well as fund our own open source work.

We are a team of over 30 engineers, cryptographers and economists, spread out over 4 continents and more than 8 countries. While we have aspirations for making an impact in the external world, as important is our internal culture and the day-to-day lives we lead while working at Equilibrium. We try to mold the company to fit our people rather than mold our people to fit the company. To achieve this we do a number things:

1. We have minimal hierarchy - We think if we hire really good people, hierarchy is largely unnecessary and potentially even toxic. We generally have a very fluid decision making process, where anyone can make pretty much any decision, they just need to convince a group of their peers with relevant experience or information regarding the topic at hand. Some tasks require some degree of hierarchy, in which case we can take the action of explicitly giving some people temporary authority to carry out a given task as they best see fit. This sort of emergent hierarchy is fine as long as it doesn't become static.

2. We have minimal process - We think that static processes are almost as bad as static hierarchies. They easily accumulate and create a never ending swamp of bureaucracy. Wading through such swamps is not our idea of fun, so we try very hard not to create one, by avoiding the creation of new processes until we absolutely have to and constantly evaluating our existing processes with the intent to kill. As an example of this, we have zero compulsory meetings, instead opting for asynchronous text-based daily and weekly updates.

3. We value life outside of work - We think we can only do good work if we also have ample opportunity to not work. We have no set work hours and encourage working a maximum of 8 hours per day. We apply generous vacation policies to everyone we work with regardless of location. Essentially, we try to ensure that everyone has the time to live and enjoy their life outside of work.

These practices allow us to be happier, more functional and more innovative for the benefit of everyone we work with and anyone who uses the things we build. We believe great things can be built when ambition and empathy are in equilibrium (ha).

So that's us. If this sounds like an environment you'd like to work in we are always hiring good people.