About

Hi! I am Advaith.

I’m extremely passionate about cryptocurrencies and economics. You’ll find me opening up Hacker News and Techmeme a gazillion times a day, digging up on new projects within the crypto and firing away git commits.

I’m a junior at San Jose State majoring in software engineering. I previously worked at DIRT Protocol - a startup founded by YC alumni.

Feel free to reach out to me to keep the conversation going. I spend most of my time building(and ocassionally breaking) things, and exploring the Bay Area. My primary toolkit includes Node, React, GraphQL and Solidity.

Research

I currently work as a researcher at SJSU within the blockchain space. We’re funded by an NSF grant and are exploring various avenues. Some of which are: using TCR’s for IoT devices and blockchain certification.

One of my main focuses right now is exploring and understanding the paradigm shift brought about by cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. This involves reading a lot of research papers, picking up bytes of widsom from podcasts, having intellectual conversations and hacking up MVPs through weekends.

Why? This new change has the potential to fundamentally solve problems within the internet as whole, is at a nascent stage and possess a high amount of uncertainity.

Taking a stab at these problems, while thinking from varied perspectives is what I aim to discuss within my blog.

On a usual day, you will find me messing around with blockchain protocols, building Node backends or lurking on twitter.

Current

Chances are you’ll run into me at a meetup or hackathon around the Bay Area.

The Internet

My earliest days on the internet were me waiting two hours until miniclip.com was loading(talk about how far we’ve come!)

I started my first blog in 10th grade with a lot of enthusiasm. Sure, it failed, but over time it garnered about 65,000 views. Moreover, I learn’t a lot about how things grow.

I still had a problem, I couldn’t code those cool web apps I used daily. This was a problem I decided to tackle over the long term. I started out everywhere - codecademy, freecodecamp, ruby on rails, etc

Eventually, after a lot of hard work, trial and error and building things one after another, I achieved my first goal - technical sophistication that allows me to build out products.

But theres more to this. I constantly keep learning and unlearning.

Crypto

I think that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology lay the base down for open networks. Although in the early stages, and having gone through several market cycles(boom and busts) - I see crypto emerging slowly. I’d measure this in terms of how much of growth an adoption we’ve seen since the last five years rather than the crypto winter of 2018.

We’ve seen a highly controversial blocksize debate, the infamous TheDAO hack, and the quick rise and downfall of ICO’s. Moreover, it was highly unlikely in 2014 for experienced teams to drop everything and start a crypto/blockchain venture. However, we now see people making career shifts toward crypto and blockchain.

Apart from this, it can also be argued that cryptocurrencies are slowly catalyzing the usage of cryptography everywhere. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if everyone on the internet had a cryptographic identity in the future.

Reflecting on the past few years, the community has come up with rather interesting use cases and products. Moreover, at a fundamental level,I think that open networks will better solve inherent ‘trust’ issues within the internet.

I also think that the amount of hype around the ‘crypto/blockchain’ premise is definitely getting in the way of truly creating value. I’ll attempt to explain this in a blog post later, using the example of Stablecoins.