Breaking into
Protocol
Engineering
Seun,
Lanlege
Founder, Polytope Labs

A little bit about me …

A little bit about me …
● Been obsessed with blockchain technology since 2017.
● Been doing rust open source since 2017.
○ Wrote a toy http framework in rust.
○ Contributed to several rust open source projects.
● Joined Parity Tech in 2018.
○ Worked on parity-ethereum, substrate & Polkadot.
● Started Polytope Labs in 2021 after leaving Parity.

Polytope Labs
● Blockchain research & development lab.
● Research areas include:
○ Blockchain protocol development
○ Cryptography
○ Zero Knowledge Proofs
● Funded by the Web3 Foundation & Polkadot Treasury.
● Browse our research
(https://research.polytope.technology)

Blockchains aren’t ready for mass adoption

Blockchains aren’t ready for mass adoption
● Most are not scalable, despite claims.
○ tradeoffs are made to achieve “scalability”
● Lack of Privacy
○ Everyone’s balances and transaction histories are
completely transparent
● Lack of secure interoperability
○ Users & Value should be allowed to move between
networks seamlessly & securely

Blockchains aren’t ready for mass adoption
● Blockchains today is like the early browser.
● Imagine building websites when we only had HTML 1.0
● There’s more work to be done at the base layer.
● Conversely, there’s also more opportunities at the base
layer.
○ 8 years of smart contracts and what have we gotten?
● Blockchain’s most successful application is still borderless
payments.

Nigeria needs Crypto

Nigeria needs Crypto
● We’ve been locked out of the global financial system
○ Virtual cards, Dom accounts, we need better.
● Crypto enables radical financial inclusion
○ Permissionless value transfers
● Crypto will be critical infrastructure for the next generation
of financial services.
○ Defi savings, Stable coin virtual cards etc
● We should be the ones building this infrastructure.

Protocol Engineering

Protocol Engineering
Protocol engineering concerns itself with blockchain
infrastructure problems such as consensus algorithms,
scalability, interoperability, privacy, applied cryptography &
blockchain client implementations (both full and light
nodes)

Protocol Engineering
● Distributed systems & Consensus
● Applied Cryptography
● Zero knowledge proofs
● Virtual Machines (EVM, WASM etc)
● P2P networking, DHTs
● Mechanism design, Game theory & Economics

Breaking into Protocol Engineering

Breaking into protocol engineering
● Some tolerance for math
● Read Papers
○ Consensus Mechanisms
○ Cryptographic schemes
○ Zero knowledge schemes
● You’re no longer a developer, but a computer scientist.

Breaking into protocol engineering
● Do a lot of open source.
● Apply for grants, Gitcoin, W3F Grants etc
● Join a protocol guild
○ Ethereum Protocol Fellowship
○ Polkadot Fellowship
○ Polytope Labs Internship Programme
● Join communities that work on protocol level problems
○ Twitter, Github, Discord etc

Q & A

THANK
YOU!
Connect with me on
Twitter:
@seunlanlege
@PolytopeLabs
Seun,
Lanlege
Founder, Polytope Labs