Meet Jonas, our new Operations Officer at Rarible HQ

Jonas Lamis is the new Chief Operations Officer at Rarible, ready to help steer the ship into new, uncharted NFT seas. With 15 years experience in enterprise software and 8 years in web3, he’s a valuable addition to the team. Read on to get to know Jonas and what brought him to Rarible.

The early years

Jonas grew up in an art family. His dad was a well-known artist in the 1970s, whose work is now in museum collections across America. Spending his childhood immersed in the arts made him eager to find his own path in life.

“I got dragged all over the place to museums and galleries, openings, and all that kind of stuff. As a result of that, I ended up not being interested in art at all. And so, I became an engineer”. 

He graduated University around the year 2000 in California, in the early days of the .com bubble, and began working in the emerging enterprise software scene. In 2014, he founded Sensai - an early AI company that created products to help large financial institutions parse large written documents. This was way before the current wave of LLMs and Sensai had its own “algorithmic tricks” for tackling text. In 2016, Jonas sold the company and set his sights elsewhere.

“I started looking around to see what I had missed, and I discovered that I had missed the early days of the Crypto revolution”. 

Discovering blockchain

Living in San Francisco, the web3 scene was taking off all around him (Coinbase had just moved in down the street), and Jonas quickly got involved. Discovering crypto was a real lightbulb moment. He could immediately see that this was world-changing tech, being built by people who believed in creating something better. 

“I had this nagging feeling…that things were kind of weird in the world. As more and more companies and governments got bigger and more things got centralized in the 20th century it definitely felt sort of like an anomaly versus the rest of human history”.

He began reading whitepapers and learning everything he could and soon “became very enamored with the decentralized nature of what a blockchain could provide, the ability to be able to trust a transaction without having to trust the party on the other side of it”

The first crypto ecosystem he got involved in was Tezos. Way back before their fundraising or ICO, Jonas was instrumental in launching the Tezos community, and he ran one of the key community forum websites. After the ICO, he became involved in the Foundation and when the chain went live in 2018 he launched a company that ran validators. 

Immersed in NFTs

Jonas’s first real deep-dive into NFTs came about through the virtual blockchain world Crypto Voxels. In this minecraft-meets-metaverse world, you can explore a 3D environment using your mouse and keyboard, moving through streets and buildings decorated with digital art. Each work is available to buy, meaning you can browse NFTs in a 3D environment and mint whatever takes your fancy. There are even billboards which you can pay for to advertise your work, or your gallery or your art show - all within the Crypto Voxels VBW. 

What struck Jonas immediately was that this was a self-contained virtual world, not controlled by any one individual: “It was really mind blowing for me, both the fact that the art was on display but also the fact that there was a whole economy that was emerging out of it — and it’s not just one company controlling it. It was like reinventing commerce here in the virtual world”.

Crypto Voxels was a project that brought Jonas back into the art world after he stepped away all those years before, but in a way that was more his style. The fusion of art and tech struck a chord and set him on a path that led deep into the world of NFTs.

He’s an active member of Flamingo DAO, founder of their partner project FlamingoTV, and is a founding member of SquiggleDAO.

Building the future of NFTs at Rarible.

For Jonas, the future of NFTs is bright. As the world becomes increasingly digital and we live more and more of our lives online, it makes sense that NFTs become more important. “I think almost everything that we care about will have some kind of NFT associated with it”. Everything is going to have a digital analogue, an onchain item that  records ownership and provenance, “and that means that platforms like RaribleX are going to be increasingly important”.

Jonas joined Rarible in August 2024. For him, a big draw was the way Rarible can create effective NFT infrastructure products. In his eyes, Rarible is not really in competition with other marketplaces because we offer something they simply don’t: infra. 

“Rarible has figured out how to become a software provider to everyone else who believes that they're going to need NFT marketplaces and NFT shops over time. More than anyone else, Rarible is leading the charge to take NFT functionality and package it up and sell it”.

Whether that’s crypto OGs, new L2s, or traditional brands with interesting IP - Rarible can provide them with the infrastructure and tools for their unique project.

“NFTs everywhere in the future, for everything. That's where we're going”.

Cheers to that!

Did you enjoy getting to know Jonas? Connect with him on X and LinkedIn and visit our Careers page to join Rarible.