Professional Experience

2022 - 2024

Organization alphaday.com (remote, France)
Main stack react typescript react-native TailwindCSS ionic django

I led a small frontend team to build Alphaday, a web app where you can create custom crypto dashboards; and Pulse, a mobile app to help you stay up-to-date with everything crypto. Pulse was released in March and by the moment I’m writing these lines it is serving +50k users.

2019 - 2021

Organization emurgo.io (remote, France)
Main stack react flow/typescript react-native redux rust

On April 2019 I joined the Emurgo R&D team to help developing Yoroi and contribute to the Cardano blockchain ecosystem. I was the main developer of Yoroi mobile, the most popular mobile wallet on Cardano.

Some features and projects I completed during my time at Emurgo:

  • Self-custodial staking: We were perhaps the first mobile wallet that supported decentralized, self-custodial staking directly from your phone.
  • Ledger Nano X/S integration
  • React-native bindings: I wrote native bindings to Cardano’s rust library. This open source package allows mobile developers to interact with the Cardano blockchain natively, without the need for intermediaries.
  • Handling hard-forks and protocol upgrades: Support for new address structures, transaction types, native assets, etc.
  • Support for Cardano DAO voting (Catalyst) project.
  • Payment URIs: I co-authored a Cardano Improvement Proposal to establish web+cardano:// as a URI protocol to handle payments using QRs, which we then integrated in Yoroi.
  • Spent a few weeks in India teaching about blockchain fundamentals to undergrad students as part of Emurgo Academy’s program.

2017 - 2018

Organization Legacy and ChainImpact (Toulouse, France)
Stack vuejs solidity truffle django

I got into crypto and blockchain at about the same time I was finishing my PhD thesis. For the next ~1.5 years, I worked as an R&D blockchain engineer and full-stack developer in a project I co-founded: legacydapp.com (based in Toulouse, France). I was mainly responsible for designing the architecture, writing the whitepaper and helping implementing an MVP (using truffle + vuejs + solidity and some Django). In parallel, I co-founded with some of Legacy’s team members a blockchain consulting company: chainimpact.io. Here I worked in early-stage projects helping companies doing R&D and developing blockchain proof of concepts.

2014 - 2017

Organization University of Montpellier, France
Stack digital communications theory signal processing MATLAB

I worked for 3 years as a PhD researcher for an institute that develops nanosatellites (CSU, University of Montpellier, France). During that time, I developed a communications link simulator based on an IoT protocol for Low Power Wide Area Networks. My focus was on evaluating and proposing novel, high-performance MAC algorithms exploiting advanced signal processing techniques, aiming at implementing these protocols in nanosatellite platforms. The results of this work were accepted for publication and ultimately lead me to obtain my PhD in electronics engineering (thesis manuscript here).

2013

Organization Airbus Defence & Space, France
Stack digital communications theory signal processing MATLAB

I did a 6-month internship as my master’s final project with Airbus Defence and Space (Toulouse, France). My work was about evaluating the use of 4G/LTE signal processing techniques for space communications through computer simulation (MATLAB).

Scientific Publications

  • My PhD Thesis.

  • V. Almonacid and L. Franck. “Throughput Performance of Time- and Frequency-Asynchronous ALOHA”. In: SCC 2017; 11th International ITG Conference on Systems, Communications and Coding. 2017, pp. 1–6.

  • V. Almonacid and L. Franck. “An asynchronous high-throughput random access protocol for low power wide area networks”. In: IEEE International Conference on Communications. 2017.

  • V. Almonacid and L. Franck. “Extending the coverage of the internet of things with low-cost nanosatellite networks”. In: Acta Astronautica 138 (2017).

Other Interests

I love mountains and being in Nature. I enjoy rock climbing and alpinism.

I also used to play the electric guitar in Cold Blossom, an alternative-rock band based in Toulouse, France.

Climbing La Picada Climbing Cerro La Picada in Southern Chile