Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis is a lifelong technologist and the Founder and Head of Technology at Pi Network. He has extensive experience in blockchain technology and software that enables large online groups to achieve their goals. In his early Ph.D. work, he developed a framework for writing "smart contracts" on fault tolerant distributed systems before blockchain and Ethereum were created. As part of his postdoc, he also introduced and taught CS359B, the Decentralized Applications on Blockchain class, at Stanford's Computer Science department.