The Thiel Foundation this year included four blockchain entrepreneurs in its 2018 class of Thiel Fellows. The prestigious Thiel Fellowship programme encourages talented young people to pursue big ideas and start companies instead of attending college.

Aparna Krishnan, Co-founder of Mechanism Labs and Social Alpha Foundation grantee, is among those who have made it to this year’s cohort.

In an interview conducted via PR firm Wachsman, Krishnan told EconoTimes that the fellowship will provide her with an opportunity to “work on something that I am passionate about consistently for the next two years.”

“For me, taking time off from school to work on a project I love with the people I work the best with, isn’t a scary decision. The default path of education will always exist and I can go back to it after I finish working on what I'm currently passionate about. This is the right time and place to be pursuing blockchain research and the industry is the best place for me to be making the biggest impact possible,” Krishnan said.

Inception of Mechanism Labs

Krishnan co-founded Mechanism Labs – an open source blockchain research lab that aims to provide a platform for progress via the development of open, decentralized, and democratic research. When asked about how and when the journey started, she explained:

“When my co-founders were at the Ethereal Hackathon in 2017, we were thinking about what we could build that would have a lot of impact. While brainstorming different applications we realized that the bottleneck for any use case was the fact that the blockchain itself wasn’t ready to handle an enterprise application. Thus, we decided to work on proof-of-stake research during the hackathon. What began as a hackathon finalist project at Ethereal, where we found attack vectors on the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Blockchain, turned into our long term research.

Initially, we started by thinking about attack vectors on Ethereum and trying to see if the same attacks were possible on other blockchains. That was when we realized that there was a lack of common terminology and understanding between different blockchain protocols and everyone was working on the same problems in a siloed manner.

As we went on with our research, we realized that the collective intellect of humanity was amazing and if we could channel this intellect in a meaningful and collaborative way we could have a blockchain that finally meets the dream of decentralization someday. This was our thought process in starting Mechanism Labs.”

As for the goals for 2018, Krishnan said, “We would love to be on the cutting edge of research, contributing to the fast growing blockchain proof-of-stake space of research.”

Krishnan on Blockchain Ecosystem, Decentralization and More…

Krishnan believes that 2018 is going to be a year which would see a lot of progress on scalability and privacy solutions for public blockchains.

“Zcash has brought privacy in terms of transactions, and Oasis is working on privacy preserving smart contracts. I’m excited to see Thunder and State Channels as scaling solutions that should be near ready in early 2019,” she added.

Krishnan further underscored four key challenges that must be overcome in order to move towards a decentralized and tokenized future. These are:

• Scalability
• Privacy
• Governance
• Incentivization

To that end, she said that Mechanism Labs is currently focusing on scalability through consensus mechanisms research and incentive scheme design.

“The biggest problem I can identify is an incentive misalignment for people who research and develop these middle layer solutions. In the age of the internet, there was an incentive misalignment for those who developed new protocols. In the age of blockchains, there is an incentive misalignment for those who upgrade existing protocols. That's probably why we see so many new blockchains. I think it is important to create an incentive that makes it lucrative for researchers to work on the vastly untouched set of problems in the blockchain space”, Krishnan added.

Krishnan is one of the first grantees to receive an education grant from the Social Alpha Foundation. With the grant, she traveled to Hong Kong and gave a series of lectures on crypto-economic design and blockchain research in various universities in order to cultivate advanced blockchain skill sets and thought leadership in the Asian region. Krishnan emphasized the importance of education to achieve mainstream adoption of blockchain.

“The goal of this education grant is to cultivate advanced blockchain skill sets and thought leadership in the Asian region. This is an important step in educating people about the power of blockchain and cryptocurrencies,” she added.

Upcoming Announcements

When asked about any upcoming announcements this year, Krishnan said:

“We don’t want to give all the surprises away! But as a sneak peek, expect us to make headway with the first paper in this space written entirely by an open source community, and to publish some cool findings of our own. We have other plans in the works!”