Max Wolter

Max Wolter learned to program the way he has learned everything since: on his own. He started as a child, on a 486 his father bought with a year’s salary, in the days of Tetris and Wolfenstein 3D. By the time the family moved up to a 60 MHz Pentium, he was writing HTML, PHP and jQuery for friends who already had paying clients, and had built his own clone of Planetarion, the browser game everyone was playing.

University gave him bigger machines. He studied supercomputing at Sweden’s National Supercomputer Centre in Linköping, turned a single-player RPG into an MMORPG on a network stack he wrote himself, and built a massively parallel physics engine for infinite space. He holds a BEng in Computer Science and an MSc in Information Systems Security Management from the University of Luxembourg.

He tends to arrive early. He was using Bitcoin in 2010, and in 2013 he founded Nexunity, a Bitcoin platform in Luxembourg. For CIRCL, the country’s national CERT, he wrote a custom Bitcoin node to monitor ransomware. In 2016 he contributed to Ethereum’s native Go contract bindings and wrote a market maker for MakerDAO’s exchange, a year before its stablecoin launched. Alongside the crypto work ran the data platforms: real-time analytics for all of POST Luxembourg’s B2B telecom traffic, monitoring for Etix Everywhere’s datacenters, and a crawl of the entire Swiss property market.

Then came the blockchains other people build on. As a freelancer he led the node software of Flow, the blockchain behind NBA Top Shot, from zero to its public beta. His company Optakt Labs, funded by Dapper Labs, went on to create the Flow Data Provisioning Service. It carried Coinbase’s integration of Flow and became the network’s Archive node, its record of everything that ever happened on the chain. For Flare Network, Optakt did the EVM work behind its smart contracts and modified the Avalanche consensus code and algorithm its node was built on. By then the company had grown to eight engineers.

In the same years Max built a 5G smart-water network for DEA, which supplies 75,000 people in northern Luxembourg, and served as consulting CTO to a dozen South African tech start-ups.

In Lisbon he turned the same curiosity on the human body. He founded Healthy Horizon, the city’s first longevity club, for health optimization and biohacking. Then he took the idea further with the Conscious Health Summit, where more than 800 people explored how much of our health lives in our relationships and our inner life.

Now he is back in software, building Optakt One, an AI system that runs his life and his companies. The AI that runs on it wrote 99% of its code, and its architecture is the subject of thirteen US patent applications. He is also Portfolio Technology Officer at Venture Technology Partners, where he manages the technology of seven South African tech companies.