Eight Questions: Prasanna Gautam, Member of Anchorage Technical Staff, Diem TSC

Welcome to Eight Questions, where we profile individual members of the Anchorage team, diving into their career paths, what brought them to crypto, and what makes them tick. Why eight? Because it’s the number of decimal places a bitcoin can be divided into. It’s also the last single digit number in a Fibonacci Sequence, and we like that.

Next in our series, meet Prasanna Gautam, member of our technical staff. Prasanna’s been with Anchorage for two years working on backend engineering, asset support, and security. Most recently, he was elected as a member of the Diem Technical Steering Committee (TSC). He comes to Anchorage with a wealth of knowledge on distributed systems and open source software development. Prior to joining Anchorage, he launched ESPN Sport Center into space for NASA, worked on building self-driving robots using Join Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS), and contributed to open source initiatives including One Laptop Per Child and Humanitarian FOSS projects.

1. Tell us about your journey growing up in Nepal to becoming a passionate open source advocate and distributed systems engineer today. How did you get into engineering?

Growing up in Nepal, I was always interested in math and science. I wanted to be a physicist but really got fascinated by computers. I learned I could do just about anything on a computer, and I’ve been coding since.

Around 2007, I got interested in the open source community. In Nepal, at the time, pretty much everyone was using pirated Microsoft software as their operating system because they couldn’t afford the licensed version. There were a lot of risks to both pirated software and what was on offer, and I knew there had to be a better solution. I worked on building Nepalinux and OLPC that made a translated Linux open source operating system accessible to all.

Before college, I took the Red Hat Certified Engineering (RHCE) exam, and surprised myself by scoring 100%. When I studied Computer Science at Trinity College, I got an on-campus job as Linux System Administrator, where I learned valuable operational skills and got exposed to real world attacks on our infrastructure. Over this time I got both hands-on and theoretical experience that told me engineering would allow me to explore my curiosities around mathematical proofs while bringing innovation to the world through open source.

2. How did you get into crypto?

I got interested in distributed systems around 2014, particularly how systems operate and get attacked in the real world. At that time, most of the academic literature focused around the idea of every node being a trustworthy node, where availability and fault-tolerance are of the highest concern vs security. There’d been research in the 1970s around Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) that perhaps you couldn’t trust every node but as long as certain conditions held, you could continue computing, and Bitcoin proved this possible. Bitcoin showed you could design a set of incentives that could solve for BFT and transfer value alongside it in the form of a ledger. After this, I kept Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on my radar.

3. What brought you to Anchorage?

I’d talked to some crypto companies around 2019 while I was a lead security engineer at an enterprise wireless startup. There I’d worked with the complexities of maintaining security taking into account compliance and regulations, something that would be key to crypto’s success. When Anchorage approached me, I found the intellectual interest in other ways to solve the BFT problem and create new and novel solutions.

The job of solving the problem of meeting compliance and legal is an intellectual journey that helps these worlds merge, making me a translation layer in creating value. I joined Anchorage because the team and the founders were aligned with what I also believed.

4. Tell us about your work on the Diem Technical Steering Committee (TSC), how did your nomination come about and what do you do?

Anchorage became a founding member of the Libra Association (now Diem) back in June 2019. For the company, being an early member allowed us to gather a deep technical understanding of Diem and how it will work. Initially, Anchorage President and Co-Founder Diogo was on the TSC, and since I’d been involved from the start and had more time to commit, I was nominated to join the TSC. As someone with hands-on experience with the codebase, and operations, I’m working alongside Diem engineers to move Diem towards a wider open source community and acceptance.

5. What kind of perspective do you bring to the TSC?

It’s important for me to bring both the open-source developer perspective and the institutional investor perspective to Diem. Both are key to building adoption and innovation. Open-source developers need incentive to contribute, and Diem needs to encourage folks outside of the core developers to gain wider adoption for the network. I’m also very excited for the Move Programming Language that Diem has built with theoretical proofs and security from the beginning for future smart contract applications on the network. As crypto gains wider adoption and has higher volumes, the attacks will get sophisticated and being able to guarantee at a deep mathematical level would be key to ensuring the funds aren’t at risk. There are innovations to be explored from other blockchains, too, new applications to be built atop Diem, and the mission around financial inclusion with Diem itself.

I also make sure to offer Diem perspective from the institutional side. Because much of the current focus on Diem is around retail facing customers, it’s important to have a voice for institutions that support Diem’s mission of empowering people and businesses around the world. Institutions have specific fiduciary responsibilities, so I make sure they’re represented.

6. You enjoy making the occasional book review, tell us about a book or two you’d recommend.

I really like the cyberpunk genre. One of the authors I’ve really enjoyed is Neil Stephenson, I’d particularly recommend Cryptonomicon to someone reading him for the first time. I really liked reading and rereading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I also really like Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness In The Sky, particularly the idea of “Software Archeology” that the main character engages in to understand future spacecraft systems.

7. As a team, Anchorage is currently still distributed. How has remote working affected you?

I spent a lot of time in the past working from remote locations, so the work itself wasn’t that different, personally. Outside of work, I try to learn a new skill every year, regardless of being remote, and doing this keeps me growing, pandemic or not. In the past, I learned guitar, how to ride a motorcycle, and took a few lessons on flying planes. While it’s hard to be locked in, it’s been amazing working with a great team and indulging in some intellectual curiosities.

8. Knowing you’re mostly stuck indoors for the time being, what’s your goal for this year?

This year, I’m learning Mandarin. Since I love hiking and traveling, this will give me something to improve and use when it’s safe to travel again.

Interested in the work Anchorage is doing on the Diem network or want to learn more about Anchorage? Please get in touch.