Trust Everything, Everywhere
Trust 'building blocks', like encryption, enable digital industries to flourish securely, but they don't extend into the physical world. With emerging technology blurring the line between digital and physical, a new trust infrastructure that straddles both worlds could unlock cyber-physical markets.
What is an opportunity space?
Opportunity spaces are areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs. They are defined by our Programme Directors, and must be highly consequential for society, under-explored relative to their potential impact, and ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible.
Core beliefs
The core beliefs that underpin this opportunity space:
Creating a new trust infrastructure will unlock the cyber-physical economy. The trust building blocks that enabled today’s £24-trillion digital economy, like encryption and cryptographic signatures, do not extend to the physical world.
Formal security reasoning is key to designing new cyber-physical trust building blocks: rooted in different assumptions (e.g. quantum physics instead of computational hardness), and living in alternative informational substrates (e.g. DNA instead of bits).
AI will make secure cyber-physical interactions accessible to everyone. The next generation of trust infrastructure will allow AI systems to generate customised, on-demand protocols in situ for any given cyber-physical interaction, spanning atoms, molecules, waves, and bits.
Give feedback on this opportunity space
Help inform the development of the programme thesis by providing feedback or registering interest in taking part in a roundtable.
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a Programme Specialist (P-Spec) and Technical Specialist (T-Spec); this is the nucleus of each programme team. P-Specs co-ordinate and oversee the project management of their respective programmes, whilst T-Specs provide highly specialised and targeted technical expertise to support programmatic rigour.
Alex Obadia
Programme Director
Alex is an entrepreneur and investor in early-stage frontier technologies, with a keen interest for quantum cryptography. Previously, he co-founded Flashbots, a software unicorn dedicated to safeguarding the decentralisation and permissionlessness of the Ethereum blockchain. Flashbots’ products have helped generate nearly £2bn so far and its R&D sparked the 'MEV' industry.
Sarath Murugan
Programme Specialist
Sarath joined ARIA from a business operations and strategy role in a defence engineering scale-up, where his team developed a product that brought the capabilities of gen-AI to the disconnected-edge. He holds an LLB from Bristol, and has experience in project and product-facing roles. Sarath supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
Nicola Greco
External Technical Advisor
Nicola is a cryptography researcher and investor. Over the last decade, he has led Protocol Labs’ Cryptography R&D team who pioneered the use of zero-knowledge cryptography in production systems, and was the first check in multiple unicorns. Formerly, he was a fellow at the Harvard Center for Internet and Society and a PhD student at MIT advised by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
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