Medet Ahmetson

In the 2010s, as a teenager, I taught myself computer science before I knew English. To understand what computers actually are and what they can do, I learned Prolog and Lisp before PHP or C.

That gave me the idea for Ara. In Turkmen, ara means "the space in between." I was imagining a programming language called Aradil: a language of mediaspace. My first real project, in 2015, was already a language: TPL (Testable Programming Language), written from scratch, ten thousand lines of C, available on GitHub.

In 2018 I joined Seascape as their first software engineer, porting a game across multiple blockchains. Three years later, when the company rebranded and launched to Blocklords, I was appointed co-founder and CTO.

Throughout that time I was skeptical of blockchain for anything beyond games.

In 2023 I left Blocklords to work on public good. Three years of experimentation, rewriting, and iteration later, I was finally able to formulate the vision as Ara, laid out in the whitepaper.

To see our trajectory, check out the roadmap page.