Story of Electron

Electron has been acquired. Story of last 4 years coming soon…

Website Timecapuled at - https://empathetic-startup-966500.framer.app/

Electron was born in the middle of 2021. This is a time when the infrastructure in the blockchain space was completely broken. The transactions per second that blockchains could process were rather low. Transaction cost was high. All the transactions were completely public.

At that time, many approaches were being experimented with in order to solve the infrastructure problems, but at Electron we firmly believed that zero-knowledge proofs, cutting edge in the cryptography domain, were going to be the technology that solves all blockchain infrastructure issues.

As we move forward in this direction, one of the first and the hardest challenges I faced was setting up a software and mathematics team that could take on a big challenge like zero-knowledge proofs. India at that time had virtually zero cryptography ecosystem. While there were one or two cases working in university labs, there was absolutely nothing going on in the industry. Hence, it was impossible to hire existing cryptographers from the market. Let's turn on zero-knowledge proof experts. While the West, such as Europe and San Francisco, had a plethora of zero-knowledge proof engineers and cryptographers that they could hire.

Hence, it was clear to me early on that the only way to build this company would be to hire people who can potentially become great zero-knowledge proof experts. Then bring them into the company, train them over a six-month to one-year period, and turn them into great cryptographers.

Within the first five months of starting Electron, I was able to assemble a team of five people. In these five months, I was also spending a lot of time on blockchain and cryptography research forums and posting about the work we were doing or planning to do. As such, in these five months, we got lucky and ended up winning a major research grant project from the NEAR blockchain foundation.

So in November of 2021, we started our first major ZK research project → building a ZK prover for the ED25519 signature scheme.

When we started working on this problem, we realized that this problem statement was much much harder than we initially anticipated. In fact, some of the top cryptographers in the world told us that this couldn't be solved at all. However, by this time we had already committed to the NEAR foundation that we would solve the problem. If we pull out now, our reputation would be gone and our company would die even before starting. Hence, we embarked on a journey to solve this problem however we could. By January end of 2022, we had made great progress on this project, and we were able to share progress and findings with the NEAR Foundation team, who had brought in top cryptographers to evaluate us. They were happy to see our work.

As a result, NEAR Foundation awarded us a much bigger research grant to continue our work and take the technology developed and convert it into a larger product. Which would be deployed on top of the NEAR blockchain, enabling a cross-chain protocol between Ethereum and NEAR blockchain

Side note: Most of the NEAR Foundation team was Ukrainian, and a large number of them were based in Ukraine or adjacent countries. When we were awarded the larger research grant, the very next day, when our grant was approved, the Ukraine-Russia war broke out. I am told that NEAR Foundation did not approve any new projects after that date for quite some time. In that sense, we were lucky and the last project to get approved from the NEAR Foundation in that period. If we had not won that research grant, Electron would not have survived.

Winning the Circom-Ed25519 project

How I learnt to do innovation thru a team as opposed to just by myself. How to get the team to innovate without needing me. Fascination about how large companies like Tesla innovate even with thousands of employees.

As the news of our initial successes spread, we got approached by the two biggest blockchain networks at the time - Terra Luna and Polygon.

We got a deal with Terra Luna → how we almost closed a big round, but then Terra Luna collapsed.

The NEAR Foundation team was in disarray, and we lost any ability to lead internally.

Team problems

Meeting with Do Kwon

Validator in the terra 2.0 network, etc etc

Sister’s Wedding and

Ukrain war, and how we got our first research grant

Expansion into KAdena, Cosmos, etc etc, hyperlane grant etc etc

How we raised our seed from Sandeep

Legion Sale and the hell week

Motivation to start

There were several motivations working together when I stared Electron -

Becoming a monk v/s founding a startup

Before Electron, I had tried a ton of ideas/startups, and nothing had worked.

The problem was not that things hadn’t worked, the problem was, I was not even feeling excited about doing anything.

I was starting to question the very reason for my existence. One thing had become clear to me, I could not live or work for making money, having a family or any of the things that seem to motivate everyday people.

I started to feel, maybe I should just recede to the Himalyas and become a “sadhu” - a hindu monk. But before entertaining this idea for real, I wanted to question - “what is that fundamentally drives me?”

I knew I had a fundemanetal drive in me, since I has done some very hard things in the past with extreme motivation and good decipline.

So I asked myself, “what is my most fundamental drive, since childhood?”

And it didn’t take me very long to remember that - Ever since my childhood, I knew It was my scientific curiosity, towards technology and engineering, and most importantly, it’s ability to change human cvililiozation.”