With the intention of learning the ins and outs of the music industry, I began my work at Epic Records at Sony Music Entertainment in December 2014, just after it was hacked and confidential data from the film studio at Sony Pictures was leaked. The hackers claimed to have obtained over 100 terabytes of data from the central server. I remember thinking: ‘why are all of these corporation’s digital assets stored behind one locked door, controlled by one central administrator?’ I felt the sneaking suspicion that Facebook or Google’s servers too could conceivably be compromised. And so, contrary to my initial motives, I began investigating a deeper understanding of how information technology enables us to communicate and found that a decentralized cryptographic network is the ‘key’ to secure databases of the future.





You can go ahead and make a call to catch up with a beloved family member, chime into your team meeting via virtual reality, or send a text informing your partner that you may be late for dinner. The world has become vastly more interconnected and new technologies continue to emerge, but are these methods of communication secure? Paradoxically, the means by which we are able to communicate also serves as the very mediator of our communication. We rarely stop and think about how our information is protected. We’ve progressed far past concealing messages by way of a quill and invisible ink.



In more recent decades, we have relied on third parties to verify the identities of strangers, mediate transactions, perform business logic, and power online marketplaces; banks, governments, Visa, and Uber are just a few third parties that come to mind. They, and other digital entities, extract economic rent through their positions in the information flow, yet their integrity and transparency sometimes prove questionable.