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I'm not sure the CEO would label it as MVP. I remember pretty well that it was portrayed as cutting edge and robust technology (hence the name Bedrock). But I do agree with you that it exposes you to some interesting areas.

You can see this thread when the project got open sourced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12739771 . The CEO's handle is quinthar.

Amusingly, see this Twitter thread from aphyr, a respected known name in the DB field: https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/788755301151477760 and https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/788757992829222912, where he is surprised that the author don't know about basic concepts of distributed systems, such as CAP and IOPS.

The CEO created Bedrock. The engineers have to maintain it because it is the CEO's pet project, and the CEO always knows best. Nobody there really loved it.

Not sure what is bold about that. The people in UP Michigan are some of the ones doing the SmartScan back office, and customer support. AFAICT there were no product/engineering people there.

It has been a while since I left the company, but back then the blockchain is essentially a checksum on previous executed commands. Bedrock uses (used?) command logging as way to propagate changes. That is, they store the SQL in a table and apply the same command on all nodes, with a single master being responsible to be the canonical version.

I worked at Expensify a few years ago. Except for some email and PDFs, the process is entirely manual. The justification is that humans just do it better with a reasonable and predictable cost.