People of IOG: Dr. Dynal Patel

Charles introduces Dr. Dynal Patel, the chief product officer of Input Output, joining from Cape Town.

Patel says he was born in Zambia in 1978 to an Indian father and a Zambian mother, spending his first 18 years there.

Recounts his father growing up in India, rebelling against the caste system, and reaching Zambia in the 1960s via an uncle's trucking business, starting as a bus conductor.

His father fled a strict Indian enclave in Ndola for the remotest part of Zambia, a thin strip of land near the Congo and Angola borders.

A pilgrimage to India after his father died, finding the ancestral village a carbon copy of where his father settled in Zambia, down to the six-meter anthills, a plate-tectonics coincidence.

His father built a distribution network of one-room corner shops supplied by motorbikes on country trails to remote Zambian villages.

His father met his mother while stocktaking in a remote village, and she was from the Lunda tribe's royal family, the niece of the chief.

Recounts his father undergoing cleansing ceremonies to be deemed worthy of an African bride, with photos of the skinny Indian man in African feathers.

Zambia's hundreds of languages and how the first president, a socialist humanist, forced intercultural mixing so neighbors were from different tribes.

He spoke seven languages as a child before a strict Christian boarding school forced English only.

At age seven he attended a 100-year-old missionary boarding school built at a central point among missionaries in Zambia, Congo, and Angola, which his father lobbied to open to non-missionary kids.

The 20-kilometer trip to school took 7 to 8 hours over atrocious roads, sometimes building bridges, with old missionary-kid stories of lions and hunting on the way.

He was stuck at the boarding school nine months a year but formed lifelong friendships, immersed in nature picking berries and fishing snakes out of the swimming pool.

A strict Christian brethren education where he memorized half the New Testament, with teachers as surrogate parents in classes of 15 to 20.

After the community funded his top grades, he moved to a British-curriculum Christian school in the farming town of Mkushi doing O and A levels.

His parents were barred from visiting despite being close, so he sometimes went months without seeing his constantly traveling father in the days before phones.

Recalls his father giving him two options, doctor or computer scientist, but he wanted aerospace engineering as a Formula 1 fan, getting into Bath University before cost ruled it out.

Having forgotten to apply on time while road-tripping South Africa, he got into the University of Cape Town for both electrical engineering and computer science, choosing computer science.

In his first computer science lecture he found his former Zambian high-school math teacher was now his university professor, a serendipitous mentor.

Always keen on industry, he was guided toward research by that professor, who took him to New Zealand for half a year on a sabbatical.

In Hamilton, New Zealand at the University of Waikato, he fell in love with research on Vodafone projects and the open-source Greenstone digital library, making it mobile-friendly for Pocket PCs.

A passion project to preserve African culture led him to win a UNESCO grant to digitize decaying museum artifacts and tell their stories online.

He ran capacity-building programs teaching universities and museums to use the Greenstone software across Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Senegal.

Recounts a plane crash in Dakar, Senegal where his 747 flew through a flock of migrating birds on takeoff, disintegrating three engines and crash-landing at the runway's end with no deaths.

He drank a whole bottle of whiskey afterward with zero effect, then two months later panicked landing into a waterlogged Glasgow airport thinking he was landing on a lake.

His master's research explored navigating content on resource-constrained Pocket PCs, inventing zoomable, squeezable, and tilt interfaces in 2004, a precursor to iPhone gestures.

Years later Samsung's lawyers paid him to explain his PhD as prior art in the Apple case, since he had built touch gestures before Apple.

His PhD from the University of Cape Town was co-supervised with the University of Waikato in New Zealand and Swansea in Wales.

Nokia and Google's Picasa team under Scott Jensen wanted his interface research, but the three universities fought over the IP and lost the window of opportunity.

Disillusioned with academia, he joined a US hedge fund owning a content business and mobile distributor, scouting new services like Groupon and instant messaging before they were cool.

Recounts reverse-engineering end-of-life phone firmwares and building a clip that reflashed six or seven phones in seven seconds, saving the distributor millions in productivity.

Green-card issues with his German university-sweetheart wife led them to leave the US for Germany.

The relationship ended when she wanted to return to Africa for development-aid work, ending up in Mozambique for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In Germany he lived in Berlin, his favorite city alongside Cape Town, then Hamburg and Düsseldorf, and did a Microsoft Research internship.

At Vodafone's group company overseeing about 40 operators worldwide, he did technology road-mapping, writing positioning handbooks for satellite-company CEOs.

He moved to the terminal business designing Vodafone-branded handsets with Chinese manufacturers across 40 markets, plus the Vodafone 360 social networking service.

His most fascinating years were five in Vodafone's IoT commercial strategy, exploring connected cars and drones as a data-hungry use case to drive 5G rollout, lobbying the EU and GSMA.

Did one of the first eSIM implementations with Amazon's Kindle Fire, letting users select and switch telecom operators over the air.

The core was a managed connectivity platform aggregating 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, and satellite for value-added vertical services in healthcare and transport.

With Daimler and BMW he built internet-in-the-car, giving consumers Wi-Fi and manufacturers real-time telematics data for new business models.

A big-data idea of telecom becoming the Visa of IoT, taking a cut of every transaction, sparked his curiosity about who owns data and led him to blockchain around 2017.

He found Wanchain, the internet of blockchains, a research-driven project like IOHK using Peking University cryptographers, founded by Jack Lu of Factom.

Says what fascinated him about blockchain was democratizing access and financial inclusion, having grown up in Zambia without basic services like bank accounts.

At Wanchain about 18 months, he hit a west-versus-China culture gap where western-conceived initiatives were hard to execute with China-based engineering.

IOHK poached him after he met Chris Cleverly in Cape Town through mutual friend Andre Cronje, leading to an intro to Diane and 10 interviews.

He was hired for the Atala project replacing Bruno around the Miami summit, positioned as a Hyperledger competitor to do for data what Bitcoin does for money.

Since Cardano nodes would run in a permissioned mode via a simple flag, they pivoted from competing with Hyperledger to the underlying data and identity problem.

After Cambridge Analytica exposed the risks of federated logins with Google or Facebook, he immersed himself in W3C self-sovereign identity as the future-proof direction.

Patel's team built their own protocol adding verifiable credentials to DIDs, starting from Microsoft's Sidetree but tightly coupling it to Cardano.

Zico's protocol design eliminated late-publish and data-availability attacks by leveraging Cardano's metadata field instead of external content-addressable storage, becoming Prism.

Prism hit an end-to-end milestone on the Cardano testnet in December, with a Kotlin SDK letting developers build in JavaScript, Kotlin, or Scala without knowing the underlying platform.

He wants a Prism Pioneers program like Plutus Pioneers with hackathons and cloud-hosted instances, which Charles pins to a September 1st launch.

Charles frames identity as as important as money, since crypto lacks the KYC, credit scores, and reputation that Prism reinvents bottom-up with challenges like revocation and portability.

As chief product officer, Patel says his mantra is to do fewer things well, most passionate about the subsistence farmer who makes up most of the unbanked.

Using the Goguen, Voltaire, and Basho Lego bricks and Plutus, he wants decentralized lending and drought insurance for farmers who now face loan sharks, noting only 5 to 6 percent in Ethiopia can access capital.

Stresses the unbanked are not charity, since Kiva.org repayment rates match or beat banks, so de-risking draws institutional money into the market.

For 2022 he wants credit ratings via AI scoring of telecom prepaid top-up data, or an open Prism platform where governments issue digital IDs and cooperatives record a farmer's financial history.

For farmers without smartphones, he envisions biometrics and a data-custodian model with a secure personal data vault accessed at local shops and banks, citing Kiva's protocol in Sierra Leone.

Charles says he will spend 10 to 15 million dollars in Africa in 2022 on experiments and partnerships like Izatis reaching 25 countries, with identity as the base layer.

Patel describes a pull model of embedding the technology in demanded services like connectivity and content, noting even a Zambian shack has a satellite dish for football.

With a three-year-old son, he hopes Africa becomes the new China with a young population and home-bred Industry 4.0 innovation instead of looking to Silicon Valley.

Closing, he has visited nearly 50 countries and now speaks six languages including Lunda, Bemba, and Nyanja, and is excited by the bottom-up ideas flowing on Catalyst.