Faculty lead, Blockchain Fundamentals
Priya Ramanathan
Nine years as a consensus-layer engineer; contributor to two open-source clients.
- Consensus, peer-to-peer networking, client implementation
- 2 courses
- 1 research notes
Priya writes and maintains the foundation track. She spent nine years working on consensus-layer software, which is long enough to have shipped a change that made a network worse and to have spent a weekend reverting it.
Her teaching approach starts from the failure cases. A student who can only describe how a mechanism works when it works has not finished learning it, so every unit she writes ends with the conditions under which the mechanism breaks.
Background
- Nine years building and operating consensus-layer software
- Contributor to two open-source protocol clients
- Previously ran validator infrastructure for a research group
Writing for the Institute
- Ordering is the hard part — an introduction for engineers (Institute note, 2024)
- What a finality gadget actually promises (Institute note, 2023)
Declared affiliations
None declared. Ramanathan holds no paid relationship with any exchange, protocol or issuer relevant to the material taught here. This is restated at the start of each course.