Why Some Blockchain Ideas Can’t Wait – Aparna Krishnan, Co-Founder Mechanism Labs

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers this episode has support from my very own the blockchain and us a newsletter get an email from me every two weeks with a very short summary of new podcast episodes so you can immediately pick those interviews you'd like to listen to to stay up-to-date just visit www.cannainsider.com/careers [Music] in labs an open-source blockchain

research lab where she works on cryptography research she was the head of education and executive VP at blockchain at Berkeley where she founded the education department Aparna has taught the world's largest university accredited blockchain course at the University of California Berkeley and she is also a mentor at Shi 256 and now to the conversation with a partner Krishna hi Aparna and many thanks for taking time today I'm excited to be here let's jump right in with what mechanism Labs does yeah absolutely so mechanism ops is an open-source blockchain research lab we focus on

doing consensus and scalability research so right now the focus is a lot on practical usability of these different consensus and scalability protocols so the reason we started mechanism Labs was when we got into the blockchain space it was really hard for us to understand what research exists and like how to dive into it and it definitely didn't seem like there was a lot of peer review happening and our goal what with mechanism labs was to create this sort of community of people were interested in doing academic research for who have some time on the side to

all just join in and work on cool interesting problems how did your journey begin into this whole space initially when I got into research I was super super focused on proof of stake one reason that I that proof of stake was really fascinating to me was partly because it's this new energy efficient protocol as compared to work I definitely didn't think that proof of work was gonna be long term sustainable and in order to build a scalable technology that lasted for years we definitely needed to consider an energy efficiency into building something like that and just the idea of how its up until proof of

stake I've been super fascinated with cryptography but just the dimension that proof of stake brought in with economic incentives was really really fascinating to me and that pretty much opened this like new area that people like to call crypto Cano makes token economics token engineering whatever different vocab they have for it but it's this interaction between a cryptography economics distributed systems probability theory Systems Theory complexity theory there are so many different fields like that merged into one and that was really exciting to me but when you when you started getting

into it I mean how what kind of research did you find you know because I often do a research about token economics and there's very there's its first of all it's very scattered yeah and second of all it's full of kind of you know medium posts and you never quite know it's just now just an ad or what is this really so I'm wondering what what your experience is there yeah definitely so when I first got started doing this sort of crypto economic research a lot of it was hey read this code that someone's written that is kind of broken or read this spec that might change in the next two days or read this medium post but a lot of it was on different forums on reddit very

very informal and I definitely couldn't make out what was rigorous and like good collection of ideas versus what was just scattered different thoughts all around um and it was hard separating the two out until I sort of discovered that there existed these feels like distributed systems which had been studying this in a very very systematic process for years and we're kind of reinventing the wheel by coming up with this new set of terminology to describe a lot of tools that were using but if we actually go back into existing literature be it in mechanism design or

be it in distributed systems or be it in cryptography a lot of the concepts stem from there and as I became more aware of that and started reading more textbook surrounding that my perception of the field and my intuition for what people would write in blog post became a lot more accurate mm-hmm but if somebody wanted to learn about token economics or maybe more specifically staking economics what should they read first yeah that's a great question and I think if they're a complete beginner they should definitely start off with blog posts so weave mechanism Labs has

written a series of introduction to crypto economics we've also written a series that explores different proof of state protocols explains a lot of the basic theory that you need I would say definitely start off with understanding the fundamental theory and read blog posts which explain the theory as opposed to explain different protocols necessarily because once you have the theory and once you have the framework in mind then it's really easy to go with that intuition and be able to like read the first sentence of like someone else's idea or blog post and know what they're gonna say exactly through the rest of it mm-hmm

how long did it take you you know to wrap your head around some of these concepts of what blockchain companies out there in the field are doing you know as opposed to academic research I mean were there any gaps you know that you had to bridge I got doing a lot of computer science and math Olympiad in high school so I wouldn't say formally studied it I definitely read a lot of papers on the side by myself or um tinkered with things online by myself so I think the biggest gap was in terms of vocabulary that people used or in terms of like so a lot of when I start to realize

initially when I was after I built up the intuition when I was reading different papers was that other people who wrote these different papers did not necessarily have the same kind of intuition so they would like leave out really important parts like for example in distributive systems if you're building a consensus protocol it needs to have both these concepts of safety and lightness but like oftentimes people designing protocols would not necessarily understand or consider both of these parts or aspects um why is that do you think I think part of it was because a lot of people think of

blockchain as a new field that is completely independent of past concepts but so they do spend a lot of time like rediscovering things that have already been discovered so I think that is one of the biggest reasons another reason is definitely that this was something that I also found really hard when I started out with blockchain was I didn't know what to start reading or what was good literature to give me that intuition and the way that I learned was by having really good mentors or professors or advisors who pointed me to the right resources at the right time and I think

like a lot of people who don't have access to that kind of in even if they are really open to learning and changing um their approach they just haven't seen the right resources yet cool what is your process you know when you start let's say new research projects I mean what kind of tools do you use how do you define the questions for research how do you know that that's a great question and I think with any research paper finding the right problem is just as hard as solving that problem and I guess to find the right problem it's definitely a process of like read enough

to first scope out what's the interesting problem and then ask yourself is it solvable based on your knowledge and then you if it's not you kind of tried to gain enough knowledge in the right areas that might help you solve it and then if you've reached a point where you can clearly say this is solvable and you can use these specific these are the techniques I've used and these are the approaches I've used to solve it then you do a deep dive into those approaches and techniques and actually go into solving it but if you realize that there are no approaches or techniques that you can find that'll help you solve this problem then you maybe go back to the board and like change the scope of the problem a little

bit and then iterate again what what kind of tools do you use in your research I mean one huge tool that I find helpful is over lead for a law tech um other other things that I find really helpful for in general just like brainstorming and putting my thoughts out is telegram and different forms where my initial ideas if I may if I'm looking for approaches on how to solve a problem Twitter telegram any any of these community mediums of idea sharing are helpful to help me find what approaches exist and I also a general like find that writing out code writing on

simulations is another very very help way of approaching different problems I think MATLAB and such are really helpful to us mm-hmm how exactly do you use these social channels for research so the way I use Twitter is if I have an idea and I kind of um one unsure if it's an interesting problem to solve - like what are different directions I can take it in I'd probably like put out a tweet and see how other people respond to it and then if if someone comes out with really interesting responses like I guess when I write any blog post I tried to put that into a tweet and then I send that

out or like for example when I was trying to understand the differences the subtle differences between plasma and sharding I put that out as a tweet I definitely find that Twitter is a really helpful resource because if you're able to reach people who have thoughts on that problem then we'll definitely like tweet back at you or something and then I take those conversations into direct message or like I try to get coffee with them or something - that flesh out the ideas more or have a whiteboarding session with them mm-hmm okay awesome and and most people that you interact

with are they in your area or your environment or are they pretty much international I would say a mix I would say a lot of people initially when I started out most people who are in the Bay Area I think as time has progressed I've become more comfortable interacting with people internationally and just taking calls instead of necessarily having face-to-face interaction do you also work with partners you know companies who may benefit from from a research question and who may also in return then fund some of the work you're doing so far we haven't partly because this is more just intellectual output

for us and it's it it's been like if someone's really interested in doing this research it's less about monetizing it it's more about finding a community of other people who can work with you on doing that research and just doing it for the greater good as opposed to like a certain kind of funding right now we have a few graphs like the Definity grant and UC Berkeley give us a grant so yeah Aparna you're also a mentor for XI 256 geared toward women in the blockchain space can you explain what you're doing there yeah so she did 56 is an amazing program so one of my

one of my co-founders at mechanism Labs she also runs XI 256 and the mentorship program basically matches up different people in the blockchain space with new women who are interested in blockchain technology and helps them have this sort of helps them have some sort of structure and someone who they can reach out to as they're going through this journey and learning about blockchain so it could be all kinds of mentorship it's a very very personalized program it it matches up people based on their

professional interests based on their personal interests where they want to how they want to grow over the next year so definitely very very specific okay what are kind of the goals that your mentees have they're in the in that program yeah so I have one auntie and she wants to she's like working in the blockchain space and she wants to understand more about blockchain fundamentals so kind of understand how to get started and what resources to read all of that mm-hmm okay cool and I mean in general what in your view you

know what what is it like to be a woman in this space because it's pretty male-dominated so I'm just curious about your your take there yeah I definitely think being a woman in the blockchain space is is hard there are definitely times where there there are a lot of like explicit or implicit biases which set in a very very simple example is for example like a group of guys might be bros and might might lik hang out and get some beer after work but

that's definitely not something that a girl would be part of and often times like it's in these sort of informal social situations that one you gather a lot of information you share a lot of new things that are happening in the space you chat about different things and maybe even like build these long-term friendships and these friendships help you make deals or like any of these little things that sometimes if you're a girl and you're not included in this similar conversations are in similar settings you have to go above and beyond in order to build these similar connections I

would definitely not say that people explicitly discriminate and I actually think the blockchain space is very unique and that people try to be as inclusive as possible but it just so happens that a lot of these little implicit things add up to definitely make it a lot harder for women but that's where I think initiatives like sheet 256 or bridging the gap and I think what they're doing there is really amazing cool I mean if you look just as an example right let's say there's a there's a start up with ten people working there how many people usually are women I would definitely say 1 to 2

at most ok 10 or 20% yeah I would say it's worse than traditional tech I would say traditional tech as maybe 30 to 40% but doctrine space currently is still worse than traditional tech to have a theory why it is I think one is a new space it's very very technical it's very new all of these kind of contribute to those who those who know others who are like already in it kind of get into it and the more bros who know each other the more they get into it but I definitely think that it's

something that is changing and it's likely to change over time another reason I generally see that as a trend is other traditional tech is like taught in university there's like a proper educational program for all that versus this is because watching in such a new space there's no like blotching degree that you can get versus you can get a data science degree so traditional avenues of Education don't exist which means it's only people who know other people who are doing it who get into it and most people who are doing it are guys so other people who like hear about

it talk about it also end up being guys mm-hmm so it's kind of a Club mentality yeah I mean we spoke about it before before the interview just briefly and I mean I told you there's somebody I know who has a niece who studied computer science for four years and then dropped out because it was just so difficult and there was just no nice future in sight and I think that's quite sad but what how should somebody in such a situation you know who probably studied for a while has maybe done a few internships and says you know I just don't really see where this can go for my career I mean what would you advise a woman or a girl in this situation I guess it comes

back to like is it something they're passionate about because of it if it isn't something they're passionate about they should probably be doing something that they care about more anyway and if it is something they're passionate about then I would definitely say like try to find other people who are passionate and more successful and like try to reach out to them as mentors advisors and see how they can be helpful because often times that kind of pushes all that you need in order to keep going okay do you also have a mentor yourself yes I definitely try to surround myself with people who

challenge me in different ways be it like in terms of business be - in terms of in terms of like coding I have a different set of mentors for different specific things one of my one of my one of the mentors who's been really impactful for me is manoosh from Definity she's she's an awesome researcher and she worked with us on our first paper she's in general been really really supportive of one women in the block chain space - she literally gave us a lot of reading resources in terms

of how how we go about like mastering the basics other women mentors who've been really helpful for me where Elaine she who's a Cornell professor a lot of her influence has stayed on with my research interests and I guess like I also have a mentor initiative 56 and he's been Jameson has been like very very impactful in shaping my views on how technology gets adopted in terms of privacy and in general like the future of cryptocurrencies and usability around

it okay cool what interests you so much in the blockchain and crypto space yeah so for me I got into it primarily because of my cryptography interests but also I see it as um I guess growing up couple things that I cared about a lot were freedom and privacy just from a lot of personal experiences and I see blockchain as the technology that what kind of experiences weirdos oh yeah like for example I was born in Oman and grew up I was born in India but grew up in the Middle East in Oman and definitely

like the culture there in general was a lot more restrictive one in terms of what you could do in terms of like what you could think about in terms of even what content you could consume in the internet like if simple things like what's up or like Skype were banned it definitely felt very very restrictive and I definitely felt an infringement on my privacy in terms of like what I could access in terms of Internet Service Providers constantly tracking all that we were doing in terms of like um I I guess a lot of small instances which

added up and that made me really value value both privacy and freedom and I guess seeing the fact that countries like China or software like Facebook exists and the fact that people and human relationships in China are hugely affected just because of a tracking software that someone built like people won't even be friends with someone else because they're afraid that their score is gonna go down by associating with someone who has a bad score is really crazy to me and I think human relationships are really valuable to me

and the fact um these are affected by tracking software that people one don't even really want but are just kind of like forced onto them is really terrifying to me and the way I see blockchain is the technology that gives back humanity a little bit of their freedom and a little bit of their privacy and it's the anti Facebook and is the anti China software hmm this will put but I mean let's hope that really happens because it hasn't happened yet I mean Facebook still exists and I don't think these will not exist I just think that they will coexist with blockchains

and there will be certain times where it is very convenient to use Facebook but there's certain kind of data that I don't necessarily want to share with everyone and I should have the ability to control that yeah do you use Facebook yourself um I have a Facebook I try to use it like very very minimally mm-hmm okay cool yeah I mean is this something you're interested in I mean why not right I mean in this space it could be possible to raise funds and say look we're gonna create a decentralized Facebook killer I mean it's not my idea I mean it's kind of out there I see a lot of promising teams working on that

and I'm excited for what comes out of it you were also teaching a blockchain course at Berkeley yeah now what was the scope of this course and who took the class the blocking class was more an introductory theory kind of botching class and the kind of people who took the class were people who had no blockchain background people it could be both developers and researchers and business majors and econ meters basically anyone who wanted to learn about blockchain there was absolutely no restriction the class was definitely more geared to

teaching one about like big about its history teaching about the culture behind blockchain and then kind of leading into aetherium talking about the use cases that this technology could enable and then in general like other cool trends and future advanced use cases and advanced developments that were happening mm-hmm okay cool I mean I think it's always kind of a challenge right to get people interested in this technology and then also simplifying it just enough so you get them interested to learn more while not kind of you know dumbing it down too much I mean was there something

that you learned teaching that class in getting people excited about this technology yeah I definitely learned that one as the prices of Bitcoin went up people's interest in the class went up okay but in general I did find that getting people to be more interactive with the technology and be feel more part of the space definitely shifted their interest in the class so as opposed to talking about these different people like metallic or Zuko or black we're all these people who exist in the blockchain space as figures who they couldn't relate to if they went to a

conference or if they went to a meet-up or something and they met other people who are working in the blockchain space so that I found it was a really really helpful way of getting people interested another way that I found was air-dropping people money and getting them to actually use that another another really interesting thing that I did was get people to write their own final project about something interesting that they would use the technology for a partner you also I think you co found it or you were you were part of the founding team at blockchain at Berkeley yeah what were the circumstances you know that led you

to to do this yes that's a great question when I joined block Sheena Berkeley was transitioning from Bitcoin Association in a Berkeley which was 15 people who would talk about Bitcoin into this consulting organization and sometime then I realized in order for it to scale up they would need an education department and it would like how are people gonna do consulting deals if they didn't know about watching so that was kind of the vision initially it was about being the hub of education in the Bay Area and then eventually it became just become a hub

of watching education what what kind of impact do you think blockchain at Berkeley has um I think the impact it currently has in Berkeley is huge it definitely also has huge impact outside of Berkeley so the Mac box at Berkeley makes within in the education space for example is the online class which over 50,000 people have signed up for their there are two classes at UC Berkeley one developers cost another just an introductory class function at Berkeley also is this really really strong

community of people in Berkeley who care a lot about blockchain it's given rise to various different groups so decrypt capital is started by the group of founders of blockchain of Berkeley decrypt also has an executive education program which started at Vox and Berkeley mechanism Labs started out of Boston at Berkeley there there's a group called port state which is implementing plasma which started out of box number three so in general it's it has impact in several different aspects off the blockchain space but it's a it's a

tight-knit group of students who all share this huge passion for blockchain now you're also a teal fellow where Peter teal gave you a grant to work on mechanism labs so what how was your experience there he funded me to paws out of school and work on mechanism bugs so I would say the philosophy is more just like some ideas cannot wait and it's not that everyone should drop out of school and build something it's just sometimes like if you hit upon something that is so

promising and you're not able to balance school with that idea or like school is actually taking away from your ability to work on something that's much cooler and much bigger um I think pausing out is not a bad idea um and I I would definitely like I think after taking the fellowship I realized that a lot more I think when I was in school there was there were points where I couldn't I would go weeks without sleeping much just because I couldn't work on research and blockchain and do school and be like on top of everything and I think the fellowship has been a

great opportunity to do exactly what I want to do mm-hmm but do you think universities can even play a leading role in these new technologies or or is it more projects like yours you know that live outside of of academia that have an edge in this blockchain research field I think there's definitely value in both University and in startups that exist outside of university um I think University is a great place to educate masses um like for example if there was a blockchain degree program in in like Stanford or Berkeley I can see how

impactful that would be in like getting more passionate people or getting more people aware of the stick getting them passionate about it on the flip side I also think that if there are already people who are super passionate about something that they're doing then maybe a university program cannot provide them the kind of education that they need in order to be the most successful so I think University is great as something for the masses and for the average person and I think programs like the fellowship are also great for people who already have that kind of have an idea of what they want to do with their life cool and and who

wants to be average anyway I mean I would not say it's like who wants to be average anyway because no like it definitely takes a lot of time and figuring out like exactly what you want to do and having the ability to take that kind of risk and commit your life to a certain cause and more I would definitely say a lot of people don't know what they want to do or where they want to be in the next five years because that's a very very hard question and I think um for people who have an answer to that maybe maybe university is not the right place mm-hmm yeah okay what are you advising you know maybe maybe girls that

you work with in in she 256 who are in this situation who say should I continue my education or should I try something on my own do my own thing what what's your advice there um I definitely think like taking hedged risks is a really important aspect in doing anything in life um like for example if you know that there's something you're passionate about and you've discovered it I definitely think doing everything you can to kind of manifest that is like just take the leap of faith but if you don't know if you're passionate about

something and you're just exploring and you're trying to figure out I definitely would not advise um dropping everything else in your life to just explore how did you find your passion um I guess for me it was always clear very early on that math and computer science were things that I cared about maybe even since I was like 6 or 7 and it just became more and more clear to me over time through actions I would take to situations I was in until at some point it just became that I had to take the

risk and the passion was obvious to me like for example with blockchain they were and when I was in Berkeley there were weeks where I just couldn't sleep because I was so I was so engaged with the research I was doing and I really enjoyed learning about blotching and I spent a lot of my time just doing that and I really wanted to just be focusing on that but I also um was kind of afraid to just pause out of school or like let that go away so that was a very clear signal that this is something I'm passionate about and I

should take that leap of faith cos yeah do you have any role models I definitely think I have people will look up to those mentors and different aspects um I don't know if I have a single role model cuz I I try to learn as much from everyone I meet in and everyone I meet has something new to teach me yeah a role model would kind of imply that there is this one kind of perfect person which I don't think exists mm-hmm okay cool what's your main focus now in things that you want to learn for yourself at the moment um so I think

personally I'm really focused on cryptography improving that knowledge and and other than technology you know maybe things that are just important you know functioning in the world or are there any things there that you're currently working on for yourself um I definitely like value personal growth a lot so understanding myself understanding just being more emotionally aware meditating those are things I care about a lot I also in general like reading different things I definitely I definitely tried to read

like different physics books are different history books are just different things to keep myself mentally engaged and occasionally I like to dance but those are those are just things that I do outside of which are very important as well yeah in your view what are the most interesting questions currently in blockchain technology that you think are worth researching that's a great question I think um one thing that I've been thinking about recently is with respect to open sourcing encode like can you have certain properties about

technology about about code without necessarily open sourcing it because the reason like private companies exist is because like capitalism capitalism works really well but for example if everyone started open sourcing all of their products what prevents other communities from just forking all of this and becoming a long-term sustainable business and I think if there is a way to maybe like not have to open source code but so verified that there are properties about that code that exist that would be really cool topic of research I definitely think there's a

lot of areas of research around zero knowledge proof said and how they could be applied similarly with verifiable delay functions and where they could be used in consensus randomness or maybe just in like other parts of technology incentive mechanism for different four stake systems another really cool and opening research mmm-hmm okay cool you're like 21 or 22 years old yeah twenty-one do you already have a vision for what you'll be doing when you're 31 well I hope I hope I'm still doing blocking when I'm 31 and I hope the

technologies so successful that I get to keep doing that for the rest of my life mm-hmm okay cool if you I mean the imagine you had something like a magic wand or like one wish or something like that what do you think should massively improve in the world maybe just people should be more aware and mindful of themselves that's something that you're not sitting through what what do you think are may be important takeaways you know for people that they should take from the things we spoke about I guess one important takeaway that I've been thinking about a lot recently is we're building this really cool technology called blockchain but who is it gonna

benefit and why are we building it because right now I don't see people using it yet and that's something that's been on my mind for the last few months and I think you're building really cool and interesting technical things that are intellectually so challenging and interesting but I definitely don't know what problem we're solving in the world what kind of problem would you like it to solve I get certain sets of problems that it could solve or I think this is my thesis is it could help provide access of provide financial inclusion

for people who don't have it right now so basically unbanked populations I'm sure there are other things but we definitely haven't built all the tools or all the things necessary just solve other things like if you want to decentralized Facebook or any such thing we don't have all the different components yet anyway yeah definitely still much more research is necessary and much more to be done that's for sure I would actually say not much more research and work much more targeted research and work so figuring out what and value you want to create and then working backwards as opposed to just creating intellectually cool things I think

creating intellectually cool things is really valuable too but figuring out how all these intellectually cool things that we've graded are gonna work together to create that final well yeah this was great thanks a lot for your views and explaining what you're doing it was really great thanks a lot for taking time cool yeah thank you for having me thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on a podcast website the blockchain and us comm to help people find it podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel stackers and I thank you very

much for listening you [Music]