SORAMITSU at 5

Today is the fifth anniversary of SORAMITSU. Over the last five years, a lot has happened! Just 2020 alone was a jam-packed year of work and many successes.

Just to summarize a few out of many, many things we have done over the last 5 years:

• built the world's first blockchain-based retail payment system for a central bank, in Cambodia
• built Hyperledger Iroha v1 and started on v2
• built Kagome,  a C++ runtime for Polkadot
• built Fuhon, a C++ runtime for Filecoin
• created Fearless Wallet for the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems
• contributed to the SORA decentralized economic system and helped launch it
• proposed, built, and deployed the Byacco payment system for the University of Aizu in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan
• won the CBDC Partner of the Year award in 2020
• won the Japan Financial Innovation Award for our work in Cambodia on the Bakong system

These last 5 years have been filled with interesting challenges and opportunities, since Ryu Okada and I founded SORAMITSU, along with Ikkei Matsuda. We've grown the company from a tiny, 2-person startup to a group of companies with almost 100 people. Running any company is quite difficult and if you are thinking about starting your own company, you should be very careful and only do so if you are able to accept failure without taking things too personally--it's a difficult and life-consuming journey!

However, for me as a co-founder and Group CEO, leading SORAMITSU has been an extraordinary honor and a way to actualize my vision of empowering people by giving them more control over their assets and personal information. To me, SORAMITSU has been a life-changing journey for myself and I look forward to the next five years!