I’m very excited to join Indorse as their Chief Scientist. My charter is to explore the rapidly evolving blockchain ecosystem starting with Ethereum, for driving applied research in areas strategic to Indorse such as security, scalability and emerging protocols/applications.

I’ve been in deep tech for about twenty years with R&D experience in both academia and industry. While pursuing my doctoral degree in CS at Purdue University, I spent a lot of time investigating the breadth of software assurance. I then worked on hardware security at Intel, where I was part of the core team that worked on an instruction set to prevent buffer overflows (see Intel MPX). And most recently, I was with a Singapore-based startup helping drive their technology strategy and product development in blockchains and cybersecurity.

When I got introduced to blockchains a while ago through Bitcoin and Ethereum, I found it very intriguing. The technical challenges of enabling decentralised applications leveraging principles from distributed systems, cybersecurity and programming languages but operating with byzantine assumptions and cryptoeconomic incentives are extremely interesting. I’ve spent the last two years working on scalability aspects of permissioned blockchains using sharding techniques and enabling transaction privacy using hardware rooted security, with applications to bond trading, cross-border remittances, 3D printing, supply chain traceability, shipping, trade finance and consumer/enterprise crypto custody.

Besides technical underpinnings and innovative solutions, I’m also interested in social, legal and outreach aspects of this technology which I believe will have significant impact in the long term. And, as the current Chairman of Singapore’s National Mirror Committee for ISO/TC 307 on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies, which has nearly 40 members representing various Singapore organisations, I’m helping organise and influence international efforts to develop and promote standards in this space.

With blockchains, I strongly believe that we have a fantastic opportunity to reinvent the Internet. However, we have several challenges ahead with designing decentralisation, cryptoeconomics, security, privacy, scalability, usability, inclusiveness and interoperability right into this foundational infrastructure. But there are numerous efforts both within the Ethereum ecosystem and other blockchain projects where some of the best minds in this space are investigating these topics, which is very encouraging.

We at Indorse look forward to actively collaborating with these research efforts and contributing to them. Please reach out to us if you are interested in buidling a better Internet for tomorrow with blockchains.