Back

 Industry News Details

 
Interview with Maclane Wilkison, CEO, NuCypher - Speaker at Global Blockchain Conference - Boston Sep 25 - 27 2018 Posted on : Jul 03 - 2018

We feature speakers at Global Blockchain Conference - Sep 25 - 27 2018 – Boston to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Maclane Wilkison, CEO, NuCypher Topic - "NuCypher: Private Data On Public Blockchains"

Interview with  Maclane Wilkison

1. Tell us about yourself and your background.

I'm the cofounder and CEO of NuCypher, a data privacy layer for blockchain and decentralized applications. My background is a blend of software engineering and traditional finance. Before starting NuCypher and becoming interested in blockchain technology in 2012, I worked at Morgan Stanley as an investment banker covering tech, media, and telecom companies.

2.  What have you been working on recently?

At NuCypher, we're building privacy infrastructure and developer tools for the blockchain industry. We're currently implementing proxy re-encryption to provide decentralized access controls and are also doing longer-term research on fully homomorphic encryption.

3. Where are we now today in terms of the state of Blockchain, and where do you think we’ll go over the next five years?

As an industry, we're still waiting to uncover the most compelling mainstream use cases that are uniquely enabled by blockchains and tokens. Most dapps so far have just been traditional applications with a payment token grafted on. I'm more interested in the native blockchain applications that weren't possible before. In the meantime, the most interesting projects are those building the infrastructure for those future native dapps.

4. You’ve already hired 12 number of  people approximately. What would be your pitch to folks out there to join your Organization? Why does your organization matter in the world?

We believe unconditional privacy is a basic human right and NuCypher was founded to empower individuals to assert their right to privacy and self-sovereignty in the digital age. We build the tools and infrastructure to protect this right by combining recent advances in cryptography with decentralization.

This is a broad mandate. As threat models and computing environments evolve, the particular cryptographic primitives on which we base our tools may change. But we will always prioritize practical and applied implementation of usable tools while avoiding the tendency to overpromise and oversell that is common in the blockchain and cybersecurity industries.

5. What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your talk?

You'll learn about a variety of promising approaches to privacy in the blockchain space, including proxy re-encryption, fully homomorphic encryption, zk-snarks, multi-party computation, and more.

6. Which company do you think is winning the global Blockchain race?

The biggest winners are going to be the networks that reach escape velocity from their founding organization/entity - the networks that become sufficiently decentralized such that they're no longer reliant on a backing entity to survive. The most exciting thing about blockchains is that they provide an alternative way to organize resources that doesn't rely on any single governing entity. Properly designed networks can leverage economic incentives to create governance markets that direct and shape the self-interested behavior of individual actors in ways that are beneficial to the system as a whole. It's an entirely new form of coordinating human organization and activity.