Meet Danil Annenkov from #TeamConcordium Russia

Team Concordium brings together outstanding researchers, software engineers and business leaders from all over the world and we are proud to introduce them to the rest of our community. Today we would like you to meet Danil Annenkov.

Who are you?

I was born in Russia and lived most of my life in the Siberian city of Irkutsk near the beautiful Baikal lake. I graduated from Irkutsk State Technical University and afterwards worked in industry, taught at the university and even worked as a fitness instructor for a while. I got interested in programming language theory and formal verification, and in 2014 moved to Denmark together with my wife and daughter.

When I am not busy proving theorems about programs, I spend time with my family. We like going for short weekend trips around Denmark, it’s a beautiful country and we enjoy being here.

How did you get involved in Concordium?

During my PhD studies at the University of Copenhagen, I worked on verification of a domain-specific language for financial contracts. Working at the Concordium Research Center at Aarhus University is an interesting continuation of these ideas with a different angle.

How can the world benefit from Blockchain?

For me, as a researcher in programming languages, blockchain promotes, among other things, using programming language theory for capturing obligations between parties in the form of a smart contract. This can significantly improve many business processes, making them cheaper, faster and more reliable. Properly designed smart contract languages make contracts easier to analyse and audit both for humans and computers. We are not quite there yet, but many researchers around the world are currently working on it.

What would you like to see blockchain doing in the future?

• More interoperability. Today, we already have plenty of companies and blockchains around and the numbers keep growing. I would like to see the networks provide some unified interface allowing to easily write smart contracts that operate on multiple blockchains transparently.
• Providing more correctness guarantees though using verified software. Ideally, I would like to see all the layers of a blockchain verified, meaning we have proof of correctness for all the blockchain layers, so we know that things cannot go wrong. That’s what my colleagues and I are working on at the research center.

Why should everyone closely follow Blockchain’s journey?

Even though currently blockchain technology is quite young and still looks a bit like a hammer looking for the right nail, I can already see that it’s making some changes. It pushes technological advancement in the areas that are probably the most reluctant to change. Big financial institutions, e.g. banks, are reevaluating their attitude to business, thinking about optimising their business processes and becoming more transparent.

Join Danil and the rest of the #TeamConcordium in our different channels:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ConcordiumNet

Telegram: https://t.me/concordium_official

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Concordium_Official

Developers Hub: https://developers.concordium.com/tech

Discord: https://discord.gg/xWmQ5tp

Gitter: https://gitter.im/concordium_official/community

Learn more: https://concordium.com

Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus (COBRA):https://cs.au.dk/research/centers/concordium/