Inmagine Group aims to accelerate blockchain talent pool with subsidized training

• Fee of US$122 for 5-day course which teaches participants how to write smart contracts
• Technical expertise important to build community and develop better use-cases

CULTIVATING talent and building a close-knit blockchain ecosystem is key to spurring growth of the technology and its use locally, the vice president of Inmagine Group, Warren Leow believes.

“Malaysia is currently lacking a deep enough pool of technical talent in this nascent space around blockchain. To position us for the future, the country needs to create a pool of well-versed talent in this space,” he says.

Hoping to accelerate this blockchain talent development, the Inmagine Groups aims to train 60 Ethereum developers over two five-day intakes starting from Sept 3 – 7. Towards this goal, the group is bringing in Dameon Green, a blockchain developer and instructor from the online training marketplace, Udemy.

With the goal of accelerating blockchain skills, the Ethereum Development Bootcamp & Hackathon is being heavily subsidised by Inmagine Group to help build the local ecosystem. However, not everyone can apply. “It is not targeted towards non-technical people. Participants need to be technically adept with an understanding of programming and Javascript,” Leow (pix, left) explains.

As a sign of commitment to attend the training, participants are required to pay a token sum of US$122 (RM500) each since seats are on first come first served basis. However, scholarships are available for deserving university students who write in to Leow.

He adds, “By the end of the course, participants should be able to write simple smart contracts and construct distributed apps based on these smart contracts.”

Inmagine Group, a leading player in the creative industry with nine different brands including 123RF and Craft Bundles, hopes to incorporate blockchain in its digital rights management. Leow explains how the technology can be applied to trace images from source to end user, “We are looking at creating a universal registry which can be used to verify the copyright of stock content.”

Although the course is also aimed at training Inmagine’s internal team on blockchain technology, the group views this as an opportunity to give back to the country, “To create a sustainable foundation, we need to build a team of core expertise as well as to see a community that can grow together.”

While the potential for blockchain to drive greater transparency and efficiency is promising, it can be tough to distinguish between real use-cases and just hype. Leow however is convinced that it is currently mostly hype as evidenced by his opinion that, “99% of current blockchain projects out there will fail because they don’t really require blockchain in the first place.”

However, he expects the dust to settle over the next two to three years for real use cases to emerge and become mainstream.

As for the slow growth of blockchain technology in Malaysia, Leow points towards the lack of technical knowledge as the main reason. “By giving people technical expertise based on blockchain fundamentals, we can liberalise their minds to imagine more use-cases which might not fully exist yet.”

Further information about the Inmagine Group’s blockchain bootcamp can be obtained here.

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