Leaders Series: Jordan Kruger @ Bloq
Issue 10 — March 10th, 2017
This series highlights the unique stories of leaders from various communities across the growing digital currency and blockchain technology industry. The goal is to showcase the fantastic work these leaders are all doing at different levels of their respective organizations, and to encourage more people at all stages of their careers join the revolution we’re creating, together!
Jordan Kruger is Director of Research and Operations at Bloq
She’s been at Bloq for the last year, but has been involved in the bitcoin community since 2012.
How did you get into the bitcoin?
I first learned about Bitcoin while I was in grad school in 2012. We were studying cryptography, and it was brought up as a discussion/reading assignment. I was fascinated by the technology, and wanted to learn as much as I could and looked for opportunities to be involved in the Bitcoin community. I did some side projects on my own studying Bitcoin network trends, but I wanted to do more, and am fortunate enough to live in DC where important conversations that shape the future of the technology take place. I became a research fellow at the Chamber of Digital Commerce, and that led to my decision to pursue this as a full-time career. I started at Bloq in March of 2016 as a data scientist, working on our analytics platform and I’m now working on the operations side.
What did you do before you got into this?
My background is biochemistry, and before I made the leap I was in grad school at Georgetown University for bioinformatics — I describe the field as data science for biological sciences. For my research, I was developing software to detect potential metabolite biomarkers, so not too similar to decentralized currency!
At the time, the healthcare industry had started transitioning from paper records to electronic health records (EHRs). There was a lot of work being done at Georgetown with EHRs, so I was able to really see and understand the problems. To me, there were many flaws in these systems that blockchain could help solve, and that was hooked and sold on the technology. I actually presented this to my department, but Bitcoin at the time had a negative connotation that most people were skeptical. Now we are seeing a lot of momentum for blockchain solutions in healthcare.
What’s been the most interesting experience you’ve had in your role so far?
Every day is a new and exciting opportunity. Some days I need a quick reality check and need to pinch myself to remind myself that I am involved with something that is extremely disruptive and could change entire industries. For me personally it has been exciting to see how the public’s perception has changed. Two years ago, people only wanted to talk about the stories making the headlines. Today, I will get calls from family and friends asking me “Will you please help me understand blockchain?” I feel like there is a “cool factor” associated with it.
What problem is your company solving? Why do you feel passionate about this?
Bloq offers enterprise grade blockchain software, services and support. Matt Roszak and Jeff Garzik founded the company in November of 2015 when they saw the needs for the enterprise customer weren’t being met. We take a similar approach as Red Hat, leveraging the best of the open-source community while offering the maintenance and service enterprise customers have come to expect. We offer a full suite of battle-tested public, permissioned and private blockchain solutions.
As you think about the evolution of bitcoin, what is one thing you think the community is missing today?
Patience. I think many in the community feel there needs to be a systematic change overnight and forget many of us are proposing to overhaul legacy systems. And that can be scary to those it will affect.
Where do you think all of this activity will eventually lead us? What changes do you think bitcoin and blockchain technology will accelerate in our world?
The past couple of years we have seen large companies, banks and governments do a lot of research and exploration. We have started seeing more proofs of concepts, and I think now is the time where we will see more of these implemented in a production setting. The initial phase will consist more of testing-the-water than anything that will have monumental impacts for consumers or enterprises — but this is a good first step and an opportunity for blockchain startups to become industry and fintech leaders. Once blockchain technology has had a chance to prove itself in a production setting and enterprises are ready to take the training-wheels off, we will start to see impactful changes to a variety of different industries and sectors — from financial institutions to supply chains.
It is also important to point out there is another story unfolding right now — government and blockchain. The past couple of years have had some important milestones. Some examples from 2016 include the discussions the Federal Reserve began engaging in conversations about blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, there was a Congressional hearing focused on digital currencies and blockchain technologies, and NIST held a blockchain challenge for uses in healthcare. All of these validate the technology. I think this will continue to be a top story over the next few years, and the regulatory landscape will hopefully become clearer.
Connect with Jordan on LinkedIn!
