Meet Kraken’s new Chief Expertise Officer, Vishnu Patankar « Kraken Weblog

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 know-how experience to Kraken and helped Fortune 500 firms like Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, and Groupon to scale merchandise that impacted tens of millions of shoppers worldwide. 

At Kraken, he’ll lead the engineering crew and work with the corporate’s management to ship the subsequent technology of services. 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 government with deep experience throughout all features of product improvement and tech management. He has constructed and led giant, globally distributed engineering groups at among the most revolutionary firms,” mentioned David Ripley, Kraken CEO. “He’s a strategic and technical chief who’s nicely geared up to construct and optimize Kraken’s know-how to ship essentially the most safe and scalable product experiences. We’re thrilled to have him be part of our crew.”

An engineering chief with sturdy enterprise acumen, Patankar helped construct early scalable decentralized applied sciences by driving the event of merchandise and infrastructure to service tens of millions of shoppers world wide. Earlier than becoming a member of Kraken, he was CTO at StockX the place he performed an integral half in facilitating the corporate’s development 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’ve gotten a protracted and intensive historical past in tech, together with “conventional” IT and cryptography. What drew you to cryptocurrency?

Patankar: I not too long ago realized that I’ve labored with some features of blockchain know-how 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 power key-value retailer at Amazon, referred to as Dynamo. The undertaking used Merkle bushes to validate information integrity. Then, in 2022, I helped launch the NFT providing for StockX. Actually, I’ve been concerned with some core underpinnings of cryptocurrency and the blockchain itself for years, generally with out realizing it!

Kraken: Individuals typically examine crypto immediately to late ’90’s tech. As somebody who labored in each sectors at each instances, do you assume it is 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 feel works is the web itself. It was exhausting to imagine within the 1990s that an e mail message might transcend bodily borders and make its method by means of a distributed naming system referred to as DNS. If Web3 turned as pervasive, the results may very well be related, if not much more necessary.

Kraken: What are you most occupied with concerning Web3?

Patankar: The inclusivity of decentralized applied sciences just like the blockchain itself is highly effective. Exterior the first use case of digital foreign money, there’s potential in tokenization purposes utilizing the blockchain in actual property, collectibles, artwork, automobile titling, id, healthcare and watermarking of AI coaching information.

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

Patankar: Probably 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 setting is moderating adoption of a few of that work, with a shift to AI purposes by means of LLaMA. I additionally assume that, as a result of computational energy being added to assist with AI coaching by the biggest cloud suppliers, there may very well be implications to the identical energy being harnessed by crypto.

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

Patankar: It’s exhausting to disregard the ability of AI giant language fashions. Though, will probably 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 numerous 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’s 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 information by means of large computational energy. There are areas in pc science and physics that would result in additional breakthroughs over the subsequent couple of a long time. One space I’m excited by is quantum computing and its interaction with factorization of huge 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 subsequent 5 years, the mission is the main focus – to increase and construct merchandise for the mainstream. This focus will imply scaling product choices and energy transaction scale far past our present charges. To be able to obtain our mission, we will likely be scaling the platform into essentially the most promising features of Web3, whereas nonetheless remaining true to our safety centered and consumer obsessed ethos.

Kraken: When you might have dinner with one historic particular person, dwelling, or useless, who wouldn’t it be?

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