Sreeram Kannan
Sreeram Kannan is the Founder and CEO of Eigen Labs, a pioneering blockchain infrastructure company focused on advancing protocols and driving open innovation within the Ethereum ecosystem. Under his leadership, Eigen Labs has developed groundbreaking solutions such as EigenLayer, EigenDA, and EigenCloud, which enable developers to build secure, scalable, and verifiable applications on-chain and beyond. Before founding Eigen Labs, Kannan served as an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, where he directed the UW Blockchain Lab and conducted influential research in information theory, distributed systems, and crypto-economic security. His academic work spans applications of information theory and approximation algorithms to fields such as computational biology and wireless networks. Kannan has also held research and internship positions at leading institutions including Microsoft Research, Qualcomm, the University of Southern California, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
Sreeram Kannan Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
-
Founder and CEO
-
Associate Professor
-
Postdoctoral Fellow
Academic History
-
Ph.D., Information Theory and Wireless Networks
-
M.S., Mathematics
Sreeram Kannan is widely credited with pioneering the concept of “restaking,” a breakthrough mechanism for shared blockchain security that underpins the EigenLayer ecosystem.
As Founder and CEO of Eigen Labs, Kannan leads his team in developing tools that extend crypto’s trustless verification to any developer and any application.
His work is central to making crypto-economic trust more programmable, reliable, and accessible to developers worldwide.
Today, hundreds of applications and Ethereum rollups are building on EigenLayer’s Actively Validated Services (AVS), secured by billions of dollars in staked ETH and EIGEN, solidifying Eigen Labs as a foundational player in the Ethereum ecosystem.
EARLY CAREER
Kannan transitioned from academia to the blockchain industry in 2018, driven by his belief in blockchain’s potential to transform global coordination.
Before founding Eigen Labs, he served as an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, where his research spanned information theory, distributed computing, networking, coding theory, and the game theory of blockchain systems.
His work explored the intersection of information sciences with blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, wireless networks, and computational biology.
Earlier in his career, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on information-theoretic approaches to computational biology, particularly RNA sequencing assembly.
MEDIA PRESENCE
Kannan’s thought leadership has been featured in Yahoo! Finance, Blockworks, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, and Real Vision, where he is recognized as a leading voice in blockchain infrastructure, Ethereum scalability, and decentralized trust systems.