Meet Kraken’s new Chief Expertise Officer, Vishnu Patankar

Kraken, one of many world’s longest standing and most trusted crypto platforms, immediately introduced the appointment of Vishnu Patankar as Chief Expertise Officer (CTO). Patankar brings over twenty years of expertise experience to Kraken and helped Fortune 500 corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, and Groupon to scale merchandise that impacted hundreds of thousands of shoppers worldwide. 

At Kraken, he’ll lead the engineering group and work with the corporate’s management to ship the following technology of services and products. His focus will likely be on scaling the corporate into essentially the most promising areas of crypto whereas sustaining its security-focused and client-obsessed ethos.

“Vishnu is a real chief in his discipline. He’s a seasoned govt with deep experience throughout all elements of product improvement and tech management. He has constructed and led giant, globally distributed engineering groups at among the most progressive corporations,” mentioned David Ripley, Kraken CEO. “He’s a strategic and technical chief who’s properly outfitted to construct and optimize Kraken’s expertise to ship essentially the most safe and scalable product experiences. We’re thrilled to have him be part of our group.”

An engineering chief with robust enterprise acumen, Patankar helped construct early scalable decentralized applied sciences by driving the event of merchandise and infrastructure to service hundreds of thousands of shoppers all over the world. Earlier than becoming a member of Kraken, he was CTO at StockX the place he performed an integral half in facilitating the corporate’s progress and launching its NFT providing. 

The Kraken Weblog sat down with him to speak about his previous and the way forward for the corporate below his management. 

Kraken: You could have a protracted and in depth historical past in tech, together with “conventional” IT and cryptography. What drew you to cryptocurrency?

Patankar: I lately realized that I’ve labored with some elements of blockchain expertise for the previous sixteen years – greater than half of my almost 25 years of expertise. First, in 2006, we invented the world’s first industrial energy key-value retailer at Amazon, referred to as Dynamo. The mission used Merkle bushes to validate knowledge integrity. Then, in 2022, I helped launch the NFT providing for StockX. In truth, I’ve been concerned with some core underpinnings of cryptocurrency and the blockchain itself for years, generally with out realizing it!

Kraken: Individuals typically evaluate crypto immediately to late ’90’s tech. As somebody who labored in each sectors at each instances, do you assume this can be a helpful/correct analogy?

Patankar: The underlying arithmetic of cryptography has largely remained secure. Nonetheless, trendy purposes of cryptography have had dramatically wider attain.

One analogy I believe works is the web itself. It was arduous to consider within the 1990s that an e mail message may transcend bodily borders and make its manner by means of a distributed naming system referred to as DNS. If Web3 turned as pervasive, the consequences could possibly be related, if not much more essential.

Kraken: What are you most fascinated with concerning Web3?

Patankar: The inclusivity of decentralized applied sciences just like the blockchain itself is highly effective. Outdoors the first use case of digital forex, there may be potential in tokenization purposes utilizing the blockchain in actual property, collectibles, artwork, automobile titling, id, healthcare and watermarking of AI coaching knowledge.

Kraken: Out of the most important tech corporations, who’s doing essentially the most fascinating work in crypto?

Patankar: Essentially the most work has occurred at Meta. That’s not a shock given their pivot to the metaverse and Web3. That mentioned, the present macro atmosphere is moderating adoption of a few of that work, with a shift to AI purposes by means of LLaMA. I additionally assume that, because of the computational energy being added to assist with AI coaching by the most important cloud suppliers, there could possibly be implications to the identical energy being harnessed by crypto.

Kraken: What are you wanting ahead to in 2023, technology-wise? May AI play a task in crypto going ahead?

Patankar: It’s arduous to disregard the facility of AI giant language fashions. Though, it is going to be fascinating to see what enterprise fashions maintain by means of the preliminary hype cycle and journey to product-market match, income and ebitda.

AI and cryptography are each probabilistic, albeit in several methods. So, for instance, it could be okay to have a 90% appropriate reply from an AI chatbot, however there’s much less use for a password that’s 90% appropriate. Individually, there may be early analysis on utilizing AI to generate random numbers that can be utilized in cryptography though pseudorandom quantity mills nonetheless dominate.

Extra broadly, AI utilized to buyer experiences round crypto are of their infancy – for instance, generative AI and personalization utilized to NFTs. Different symbiotic areas between AI and crypto are cybersecurity and fraud prevention.

Past these, each AI and crypto discover giant quantities of knowledge by means of huge computational energy. There are areas in pc science and physics that would result in additional breakthroughs over the following couple of a long time. One space I’m excited by is quantum computing and its interaction with factorization of enormous numbers.

Kraken: What’s your five-year plan right here at Kraken? What do you hope to have the ability to do right here?

Patankar: Kraken is among the many most trusted manufacturers in crypto. Given this basis, over the following 5 years, the mission is the main focus – to broaden and construct merchandise for the mainstream. This focus will imply scaling product choices and energy transaction scale far past our present charges. With a purpose to obtain our mission, we will likely be scaling the platform into essentially the most promising elements of Web3, whereas nonetheless remaining true to our safety targeted and shopper obsessed ethos.

Kraken: In case you may have dinner with one historic individual, dwelling, or useless, who wouldn’t it be?

Patankar: Satoshi Nakamoto – I’d wish to know whether or not he learn the 2007 Dynamo paper and the piece round Merkle bushes and the gossip protocol!