I remember the first time I met Ivan Bjelajac. We were seated in the lounge room of a sprawling villa perched high on a hill in Ko Samui that faced the Gulf of Thailand with its ancient islands in the distance. 

We were among a group of entrepreneurs who had flown in from all over the world for a digital nomad experience. In the group were some confident characters, including the owner of one of Scandinavia’s largest sex toy companies, a Dutch woman who had taken over her father’s architectural firm and a fashionable jet-setter of no fixed abode who had found success in the lithium battery business. 

As with any group of strangers, you quickly find out who the extroverts are. Ivan Bjelajac was not one of them. He was an observer. Over the course of the week it became clear that when he spoke, it was in your interest to listen. He had a Yoda-like magnetism that compelled you to hang on his every word. 

This was six years ago. Since then, Ivan has observed a lot of changes in his native Serbia, most notably its transformation into a vibrant tech ecosystem. With a population of just under 7 million people, Serbia now boasts over fifty Web3 companies in operation. A promising gaming industry has emerged, resulting in expertise in building Metaverse projects.

His own career has taken him from software engineer to multi-exit founder, CEO and industry champion. He also served as president of the Serbian Blockchain Initiative for four years.  

Miriam Feiler: It is probably a little known fact that your company, MVP Workshop, is playing a pivotal role in the development of the Polygon blockchain. How did this come about?

Ivan Bjelajac: We got into Web3 quite early by working on an email system that used Ethereum and IPFS to send emails. Commercially, the project was not successful due to the cost of using the network, so we were early believers in L2 solutions. We were very active in a number of projects looking to scale Ethereum in some way. 

Our friend and colleague, fellow Serbian Mihailo Bjelic, started working on the concept together with us in 2019. We helped him with a few proof-of-concept projects and some business ideas. We had problems securing external funding for such a big open-source project and were looking for alternatives.

Then the reverse merger of his project with Matic happened and Polygon exploded. Mihailo and Matic’s founders quickly became key figures in the Ethereum ecosystem.

We are still behind the team building Polygon Edge. Edge lets you spawn your own blockchain and offers you a plug-and-play Ethereum client that you can enhance with pluggable networking and consensus protocols.

MF: What are you observing at the moment in your industry? 

IB: Web3 is already here and very much alive. Financial services and the creator economy will only grow bigger over time. We will surely see new gaming companies getting into blockchain soon.

In the long term, we will probably see fault tolerant systems everywhere and there will be more and more ways they will interconnect. Right now, there is still not enough interoperability or automatization to enable all possible use cases - but we will get there over time. 

MF: What is your proudest tech moment?

IB: I actually think it has to be the launch of our R&D Centre 3327.io. 

We have been involved with so many successful product launches at very early stage, including some notable unicorns. 3327 is our way of formalizing our process in order to have a framework to successfully replicate it in the future. The pace of innovation in 3327 is something that gets me hyped every day.

MF: What's next for MVP Workshop?

IB: We are planning to keep up the same momentum that led to the opportunity of working with Polygon and Celsius. There are still many, many things to be built in the Web3 space. The last five years have been quite a ride. We plan to start publishing more tech overviews and lessons learned too. 

But right now, I am taking a small breather for the first few months of 2022 before diving right back into venture building at full speed.

Miz Feiler is a Metaverse community builder, podcaster and creator based in Singapore. She co-creates, as well as independently produces programs, events and creative projects in word, sound video, music and art - both physical and digital. Her NFT project New Day Tomorrow is a collective of musicians, artists and creative technologists exploring Memory and its tangled complexities. She educates entrepreneurs about Web 3 and the Metaverse through her podcast, The Metaverse With Miz.