Niall is a founding partner of The Building Blocks, a Venture Builder for the next iteration of the Web, and a CTO-in-Residence at the UCL School of Management, where he teaches data science, software, and data engineering, and distributed ledger technologies/blockchain.
Niall's academic and professional journey in the DLT space began in 2008 when he first heard of Bitcoin. He then started mining Bitcoin in 2014 and has since made significant contributions to the development and deployment of proof-of-concept property transactions using DLT with the UK Land Registry. He is also a member of Construction Blockchain Consortium and the Hedera HashGraph TechCom and a Research Associate for the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies.
In his role as a Technical Steering Committee member of Accord Project, an open-source Legal Smart Contract project, Niall has demonstrated the use of smart legal contracts to improve automation in the areas of Real Estate, trade finance, and making contracts adaptive to events such as Covid-19.
As a DLT expert, Niall has won several hackathons, presented at conferences, published papers, and contributed to books on Smart Contract, Oracles, and Smart Legal Contract case studies. He is also a mentor to several DLT startups in various programs.
Niall's involvement with the DLT Science Foundation (DSF) began when he met the founding members in an academic context when the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies first started running their executive training program, where he contributed to the training.
Niall says, “l was attracted to working with the DSF because of the opportunity to collaborate with world-leading researchers and professionals in this space and work on emerging research in DLT and its practical implementation in industry to disrupt existing business models”.
As a DSF member, Niall hopes to help define and contribute to research areas and projects in the foundation, promote academic and industrial collaboration, and disseminate results. He believes that in the next 5-10 years, DLT will play a crucial role in building privacy-preserving and legally compliant solutions and sustainable DAOs, among other areas.
To stay up to date with Niall's work and the DSF's activities, you can follow Niall on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/niallroche/) and Twitter (@niallroche), and the DSF on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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