We are excited to welcome Raymond Cheng to the Protocol Labs Research team. We asked Raymond about his journey to Protocol Labs, the projects he will be working on, and his thoughts about future technological developments:

How did you decide to join Protocol Labs?

I am really excited of the potential of mechanism design to accelerate positive social missions. I was delighted to find such a smart group of people who believe in the same thesis, with a can-do attitude to put words into action. The Network Goods team at PL is a really unique organization. By putting our collective minds together, I believe we can better create open access knowledge and open source software to advance this mission. I am looking forward to bringing my combined experience in startups and research to launch new products in this space with the support of Protocol Labs.

What problems are you most interested in?

Science has transformative impact on society. By expanding our collective knowledge, we simultaneously better understand the universe, while preparing ourselves for the future. What is the primary bottleneck to society’s progress engine? What if we were able to train, fund, and guide an order of magnitude more people into the scientific process to solve humanity’s long-term challenges and questions? I look forward to exploring new coordination mechanisms, such as impact certificates, for accelerating science.

What future technology are you most excited about?

Advances in cryptography and their future applications. After years in the industry, the fact that we can use math to guarantee different security goals still mesmerizes me. As a class of tools, it has had incredible impact and promises more future impact towards preserving our individual liberties to speak, think, and organize freely.