The glue that holds society together is trust – trust in banks, governments, media, as well as each other. But trust is transforming; institutional trust is eroding while people are depending on peer-to-peer trust more than ever. Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT, believes digital currencies and blockchains – public ledgers in which transactions between users in a network are stored in a secure, verifiable and permanent way – offer a positive path forward in an era of shifting trust by maintaining the integrity of online transactions, records and other underpinnings of commerce. While these concepts have received enormous press attention, fundamental questions remain about how these technologies work and what they mean for our future economic wellbeing.
An engaging speaker, Narula is adept at presenting the complex details of currencies and blockchains; she’s impassioned, understandable and relatable. She believes blockchains will cause the emergence of new services that are both more accessible and transparent. Beyond transparency, digital currencies hold the promise of allowing people and companies to send and receive money across borders and disintermediate banks, brokerages, and currency exchanges. While financial institutions will still play a large role, they will need to adapt to this new ecosystem, as Narula explains in “The Future of Money,” her brief yet powerful TED Talk. But blockchain technology can be applied well beyond finance, increasing accountability and credibility for businesses, media, governments and non-profits. One application area needing transparency, for example, is the food supply chain, where blockchains can provide assurance about safety, quality and provenance of food substances.
Narula’s research and insights have garnered widespread acclaim: she was named to the 2018 Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led, as well as Fortune’s The Ledger 40 Under 40 list. Narula earned a PhD in computer science at MIT, during the completion of which she built computer databases, kindling her interest and enthusiasm in the blockchains that comprise cryptocurrency transactions. Previously, she was a senior software engineer at Google, where she designed scalable storage. Narula is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Blockchain.
