In 2014, I earned a Ph.D in Mathematics in the area of numerical algebraic geometry. I am a Simons-Berkeley Fellow and an IBM Center of Excellence Fellow in High Performance Computing. After ignoring blockchain technologies for nearly 5 years, I joined the space in 2014, started trading, and never looked back. I brought myself up to speed on the existing technology stack and began to invest in innovative projects and early stage protocols. Eventually, I started to do angel investing in pre-seed / seed start-ups with some connection to the distributed ledger space. I left IBM in 2017 to pursue a career in the blockchain space full-time, offering consulting services for a number of projects. My expertise ranges from general business strategy to the deeply technical issues. After observing various inefficiencies in blockchain technology and the slowness to adapt pre-existing mathematical tools and concepts in the space, I co-founded Aleph Zero. The backbone in any distributed system is its consensus protocol. Consensus is used to achieve what is known as State Machine Replication (SMR). SMR is nothing more than maintaining the state of a database across multiple nodes, all of whom have the authority to update the database. How do you do this when the nodes of the network maybe controlled by a powerful malicious actor? The Aleph Zero protocol builds on top of the distributed systems research of the last 4 decades. Aleph Zero is peer-reviewed and the current state-of-the-art in asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant protocols. As such, the Aleph Zero platform uniquely solves the blockchain trilemma and achieves unprecedented levels of decentralization, security, and scalability. Our private testnet achieves speeds of 89,600 transactions per second and confirms transactions within .416 seconds using 112 nodes geographically distributed across 5 continents. In addition, the Aleph Zero research team constructed the first-ever asynchronous distributed key generation protocol which enables a randomness beacon. A secure source of randomness is a crucial component for secure multiparty computation which in turn enables private smart contracts on a public ledger. Using MPC, developers can build applications that allow their users to not only own their own data, but users can sell it in an encrypted format allowing for dAPPS to still perform machine learning on the data. Interested in developing on the Aleph Zero technology stack or integrating a private, permissioned ledger for your business? Get in touch, and see how we can help you today!