About Us

LinkWell Nodes is a U.S.-based Web3 infrastructure company delivering Chainlink oracle services and secure blockchain node deployments. With over 25 years of combined experience in the cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and financial services industries, LinkWell Nodes is dedicated to building a world powered by cryptographic truth.

Member biographies

Ken

Ken is a Maryland-based U.S. Navy veteran, cybersecurity professional, and software engineer with specialized knowledge and expertise in multiple cutting edge technology vectors including cloud infrastructure, enterprise monitoring, and Web3. He holds a masters degree in cybersecurity technology and several Splunk, AWS, and cybersecurity certifications.

Ken currently supports NASA's infrastructure and security operations center as a full time Splunk professional services consultant - primarily supporting NASA's security teams in keeping the 'bad guys' out, and ultimately enabling NASA to focus on their mission of getting humanity back to the moon and beyond! His true ambitions and passion, however, lie with Chainlink. Ken is a co-founder of LinkWell Nodes - a Chainlink community node operations team. As a subject matter expert and follower of Chainlink since late 2017, he is dedicated to supporting the Chainlink community anyway he can.

Derek

Derek is a full-stack software engineer and AWS Solutions Architect with over 15 years of experience in the Wall Street, Web3, and cloud computing sectors. Derek began his career at Wellington Management - a private investment firm - developing, supporting, and ensuring the 24/7 reliability of their premier global fixed income trading platform - a system managing over $600B in client investments.

After 8 years of work in the traditional finance sector, Derek left to pursue a career in cryptocurrency, dedicating his full focus to building scalable, low-latency, AWS-based cryptocurrency trading algorithms - including one that became the fastest triangular arbitrage bot on Binance from 2019 through 2021, successfully trading over 360 million USD in volume per annum. More recently, Derek's passion has evolved to supporting the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, deciding to cut his teeth on Chainlink infrastructure by competing as a solo contestant in their 2022 Oracle Olympics, ultimately placing 1st during the final week of trials - but not quite enough to secure 1st place overall.

Derek is confident that his extended experience in building world-class production systems in the traditional financial sector, his passion for distributed cloud infrastructure, and his absolute love for the Chainlink / DeFi sector, positions him well for supporting the vision of LinkWell Nodes.

Derek is based primarily in Boston, Massachusetts, but spends half the year in San Diego, California, enjoying the sunny weather and outdoor recreation.

Company background

LinkWell Nodes was created shortly after the 2022 Chainlink Oracle Olympics - a global competition of 30 professional teams vying for the right to become the next official Chainlink node operator. As individual participants during the competition, Ken and Derek ended up tying for third place - passing every challenge that Chainlink threw at them, but just barely missing out on the bonus points which cinched the victory for the winning team. After the competition, Derek and Ken decided to join forces, each noticing the strengths, capabilities, and professionalism in the other. Shortly after, LinkWell Nodes was formed.

Derek and Ken went back to the drawing board, designing and engineering a scalable, robust, and re-usable Chainlink node infrastructure model from the ground up. After a year of aggressive engineering efforts in the deployment, monitoring, and security spaces, their infrastructure solution was humming along smoothly, and they were ready to start supporting projects in the Web3 space.

Fast-forward to today, LinkWell Nodes is proud to support custom data feeds on 14 mainnet and 13 testnet blockchains, and is committed to delivering secure, reliable, and timely on-chain data services to all of their Web3 customers. LinkWell Nodes has its eyes set on eventually becoming an official Chainlink node operator, but more importantly, covets the position of being recognized as the most reliable, communicative, and passionate blockchain node operators present within the Chainlink (and broader Web3) ecosystem.

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