Future-Proofing FinTech With Blockchain Technology

What if a single software bug could lose billions of dollars? Discover the high-stakes engineering challenges behind future-proofing finance with blockchain.

#1about 3 minutes

A career journey from traditional finance to blockchain

The speaker traces his career from working with large-scale C++ systems and FinTech at Citibank to becoming CTO at the Algorand Foundation.

#2about 3 minutes

Identifying the three core use cases for blockchain

Blockchain technology is most effective for applications requiring disintermediation, provenance and veracity, or decentralized self-sovereign identity.

#3about 6 minutes

The unique engineering challenges of building blockchain protocols

Building core blockchain protocols requires a rare combination of skills in distributed systems, applied cryptography, and concurrent programming with extremely high stakes for security and backwards compatibility.

#4about 2 minutes

Leadership challenges in managing specialized blockchain teams

Leading high-caliber engineering teams in blockchain is challenging due to long development cycles, formal methods, and the adversarial nature of QA and benchmarking processes.

#5about 2 minutes

Understanding blockchain as a distributed operating system

Blockchains can be understood as distributed operating systems where smart contracts are like applications executed simultaneously across a network with cryptographic assurance.

#6about 4 minutes

The three architectural layers of a blockchain network

A blockchain's architecture consists of three core components: the network layer for data propagation, the consensus layer for agreement, and the ledger layer for transaction rules.

#7about 8 minutes

How trap door functions enable asymmetric cryptography

Asymmetric cryptography like RSA is built on mathematical "trap door" functions, such as the difficulty of factoring large semi-prime numbers, which are easy to compute one way but hard to reverse.

#8about 3 minutes

How elliptic curve cryptography powers modern blockchains

Elliptic curve cryptography uses the discrete logarithm problem on a Cartesian plane as its trap door function, where a private key is a large number and a public key is an XY coordinate.

#9about 4 minutes

Preparing for the threat of quantum computing

Quantum computers threaten to break current cryptographic standards, prompting a shift to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) that uses techniques like lattices and super-singular elliptic curves.

#10about 6 minutes

Blockchain fundamentals and real-world use cases

Blockchain is a distributed, cryptographically linked data structure enabling applications like financial inclusion for unbanked populations and self-sovereign ownership of digital assets.

#11about 5 minutes

The future of blockchain, decentralization, and identity

The future of the industry involves greater decentralization, the adoption of quantum-resistant cryptography, and a focus on self-sovereign identity and privacy.

#12about 2 minutes

The biggest pitfalls and risks of blockchain technology

The primary risks in blockchain are catastrophic software bugs that can lead to massive financial loss and the high personal responsibility required for self-sovereign key management.

#13about 3 minutes

Upcoming developer features and applications on Algorand

Algorand is expanding its use cases into identity and lowering the barrier for developers by enabling smart contracts to be written in standard Python.