Amrit Kumar: The Journey from Zilliqa to AltLayer’s Future

• Amrit Kumar co-founded Zilliqa and later transitioned to AltLayer, focusing on blockchain scalability and roll-up technology for Web3 applications.
• At AltLayer, Amrit Kumar enhances decentralized roll-ups, aiming to improve security, scalability, and user accessibility in blockchain infrastructure.

Amrit Kumar has established quite a name for himself in the industry of blockchain technologies. His path started in academia and progressed to become among the main players in the development of creative blockchain technology.

Amrit Kumar: Early Passion for Cryptography

Amrit, who was naturally interested in computer technology, studied in France. 2013 saw him graduate from the National School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics of Grenoble with a Masters degree in cryptography.

He kept on his studies and graduated from Université Grenoble Alpes with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2016. Amrit participated in several security, privacy, and applied cryptography-oriented research projects while still in school.

From Academia to Blockchain: A Turning Point

Amrit had an opportunity to be a visiting researcher at the University of Calgary following completion of his doctorate studies. But the need to go back to Asia led him, in November 2016, to the National University of Singapore (NUS) as a researcher.

Here his career’s turning point started to take place. Amrit delved into studies on blockchain scalability—more especially, the sharding technique—along with his advisor, Prateek Saxena. This method seeks to split the network into smaller pieces to boost transaction efficiency.

Zilliqa: Bringing Blockchain Scalability to Life

The outcomes of this study came to pass in actual form in June 2017, when Zilliqa was founded. Launching Zilliqa as the first public blockchain platform to use sharding to increase scalability and security, Amrit teamed with colleagues Prateek Saxena, Max Kantelia, Xinshu Dong, Dr. Yaoqi Jia, and Juzar Motiwalla. Amrit led numerous projects and advancements at Zilliqa as President and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO), five years in service.

From Zilliqa to AltLayer: A Shift in Focus

Still, as the adage goes, “change is the only constant,” and Amrit chose to pursue fresh challenges. He declared his leaving from Zilliqa early in 2022. Shortly following, in May 2022, he became Chairman of Binarii Labs, a Web3 data security development-oriented startup.

Then in October 2022, Amrit assumed the Chief Operating Officer (COO) post at AltLayer, a decentralized protocol providing roll-up-as-a-service solutions for Web3 applications.

How Amrit Kumar Shapes AltLayer’s Future

Amrit is very important at AltLayer in guiding the worldwide operational strategy of the business. AltLayer itself is an open protocol meant to streamline the deployment of application-specific roll-ups using its Roll-up as a Service (RaaS) system.

Without needing to control node operations or code maintenance, this service lets developers start roll-ups fit for their application requirements. In working with EigenLayer, AltLayer also developed the idea of “restaked roll-ups,” which seeks to enhance the security and decentralization of current roll-ups.

Making Blockchain More Accessible for Everyone

Amrit thinks the larger society should have easier access to and use of blockchain technology. He has underlined several times the need for enhancing the user experience in blockchain systems.

He claims that many programs nowadays are less user-friendly since developers design them for other developers. He so promotes a paradigm change to give end users’ wants and convenience top priority.