Nicola Greco

I am working to re-decentralize the webRead more about my work here. I am a researcher at Protocol Labs. PhD student (on leave) at MIT advised by Tim Berners-Lee and friend at Berkman Center. Once an entrepreneur, a UCL student, a Mozillian.

Protocol Years

April 24, 2024

Hey team,

I have been at Protocol Labs for 7 years, most part of my adult life. My main drive has always been to design a decentralized web infra - I was doing this at MIT and I left my PhD midway to join Juan and the early team - they were doing it for real - here I found many people that shared that same drive, many of us still do today. For all these years, Protocol Labs has been a place for visionary breakthrough innovation, which I had the possibility to help shape and look forward to its next iteration.

For everyone at PL:

My words won’t be enough to thank everyone for the wonderful rollercoaster dream-like adventure life changing experience that Protocol Labs has been. I am deeply grateful. Thank you!

For the people that worked directly with me:

Throughout the years I built many versions of the same team, an open distributed research lab (Filecoin Research -> Red Team -> CryptoLab -> CryptoNet). To you, I say: thank you for your trust in working with me for many years of your life and to share the vision of our research lab - my personal goal was to create teams that could do repeatable innovation, deploy real world cryptography safely, attract unique talent and be a point of reference in the ecosystem - you made this happen. Thank you!

Finally deep thank you to Juan for believing in me at the beginning of this adventure.

I look forward to all the future of Protocol Labs and the new teams forming.

– Nicola

The year 2024 ends my Protocol years.

The past seven years on this blog have been silent. I truly have dedicated most of my adult life in building decentralized systems, surrounded by incredible talent while at Protocol Labs. Months have passed, but I have yet to digest what an incredible ride it has been.

Protocol Labs was more than a company to me, it was a way to express myself on what I believe in, what I want to build and how I want to work. We invented many things, operated in a truly non-standard way, contributed to pushing humanity forward and pushing the frontier of research. In particular with my team at CryptoNet, we built an open distributed research lab, with 50+ collaborators, tens of peer-reviewed papers, many protocol improvements used by thousands of users and deployed a lot of new cryptography safely in the real world.

I look forward to the future of Protocol Labs in their next iteration as I will continue to be around this new Protocol Labs “network”.

- Nicola Greco,
Keep on rocking the decentralized web

Thanks for reading

  • Introducing Quantum Punks Sep 04, 2024
  • Protocol Years Apr 24, 2024
  • Before Tokens Jul 24, 2017
    • Protocol Years - April 24, 2024 - Nicola