Ethereum Foundation Researcher Prateek joins Marlin

It’s hard to find a needle in the haystack. The same goes for when you’re looking for the right someone to join your team - but situations have a way of presenting itself.

We’re super pumped to have Prateek help solve some of the most interesting problems in decentralized networking. It’s pretty cool and certainly no walk in the park.

Prateek has joined us recently and spends his time performing research and designing the various aspects of Marlin Protocol like crypto economics, network topologies, payment mechanisms etc. that can improve the performance of blockchains at layer-0 while tolerating unpredictability and attacks in real world decentralized P2P networks.

“The Marlin Protocol has enormous potential in solving interesting problems at the network layer and consequently scaling blockchains. Our solution is also generic enough to resolve some long standing issues like ‘full-node incentivization’. It’s exciting to be part of a team working on solutions that are potentially going to benefit the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.” - Prateek Yammanuru, Researcher, Marlin Protocol.

Prateek’s been bitten by the decentralized revolution bug since some time, taking his time to make his way to us. Well, that’s the story we like to tell everyone anyway.

Starting out at Wipro, Prateek was a major contributor in the design and development of a framework used for testing blockchain platforms by introducing byzantine failures into networks. Observing and evaluating the performance of different blockchains helped him gain unique insights into the limits of various protocols.

At the Ethereum Foundation, he researched various options to make state storage sustainable in the long run. Prateek also designed and proposed a protocol to implement rent-based sustainable storage for Ethereum which improved upon the user experience compared to existing alternatives at the time. He also proposed protocols to reuse similar smart contract code in Ethereum in the context of storage rent.

Along with his team, he won the ETHIndia 2019 hackathon, for their work on Selective ZKP - a decentralized platform for role-based access view of confidential assets created using Zero Knowledge Proofs.

Prateek has already learnt the ropes at Marlin. He has begun analyzing different crypto-economic and networking techniques to incentivize and optimize P2P propagation of data. As an example, in the post on ODSBR and the associated series he walks readers through interesting techniques in the context of designing byzantine-resistant networking protocols. We hope that Prateek’s experience with state-rent at EF will enable him to contribute effectively to our objective of network-layer incentivization.

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