Meet Kraken’s new Chief Expertise Officer, Vishnu Patankar

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Kraken, one of many world’s longest standing and most trusted crypto platforms, at this time 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 thousands and thousands of shoppers worldwide. 
At Kraken, he’ll lead the engineering staff and work with the corporate’s management to ship the subsequent technology of services and products. His focus might be on scaling the corporate into probably 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 facets of product improvement and tech management. He has constructed and led giant, globally distributed engineering groups at among the most modern corporations,” stated David Ripley, Kraken CEO. “He’s a strategic and technical chief who’s nicely geared up to construct and optimize Kraken’s expertise to ship probably the most safe and scalable product experiences. We’re thrilled to have him be part of our staff.”
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 thousands and thousands of shoppers around the globe. 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 beneath his management. 
Kraken: You’ve 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 facets of blockchain expertise for the previous sixteen years – greater than half of my practically 25 years of expertise. First, in 2006, we invented the world’s first industrial power key-value retailer at Amazon, known as Dynamo. The venture used Merkle bushes to validate information integrity. Then, in 2022, I helped launch the NFT providing for StockX. In reality, I’ve been concerned with some core underpinnings of cryptocurrency and the blockchain itself for years, typically with out realizing it!
Kraken: Folks typically examine crypto at this time to late ’90’s tech. As somebody who labored in each sectors at each occasions, do you assume this can be a helpful/correct analogy?
Patankar: The underlying arithmetic of cryptography has largely remained secure. Nevertheless, fashionable functions of cryptography have had dramatically wider attain.
One analogy I believe works is the web itself. It was laborious to consider within the Nineteen Nineties that an electronic mail message might transcend bodily borders and make its means via a distributed naming system known as DNS. If Web3 turned as pervasive, the results might be comparable, if not much more vital.
Kraken: What are you most taken with relating to Web3?
Patankar: The inclusivity of decentralized applied sciences just like the blockchain itself is highly effective. Exterior the first use case of digital forex, there’s potential in tokenization functions utilizing the blockchain in actual property, collectibles, artwork, automobile titling, id, healthcare and watermarking of AI coaching information.
Kraken: Out of the largest tech corporations, who’s doing probably 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 stated, the present macro atmosphere is moderating adoption of a few of that work, with a shift to AI functions via LLaMA. I additionally assume that, as a result of computational energy being added to assist with AI coaching by the biggest cloud suppliers, there might 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 job in crypto going ahead?
Patankar: It’s laborious to disregard the facility of AI giant language fashions. Though, it is going to be fascinating to see what enterprise fashions maintain via 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% right reply from an AI chatbot, however there’s much less use for a password that’s 90% right. 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 via large computational energy. There are areas in pc science and physics that might result in additional breakthroughs over the subsequent couple of many years. 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 subsequent 5 years, the mission is the main target – to increase and construct merchandise for the mainstream. This focus will imply scaling product choices and energy transaction scale far past our present charges. As a way to obtain our mission, we might be scaling the platform into probably the most promising facets of Web3, whereas nonetheless remaining true to our safety centered and consumer obsessed ethos.
Kraken: Should you might have dinner with one historic individual, dwelling, or lifeless, 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!
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