Smartz Team. Interview with Head of Research Sergey Prilutskiy

We continue to introduce our founders to you. This time we interviewed our Head of Research Sergey Prilutskiy.

— Sergey, you have worked in Mail.Ru Group for 9 years. Why did you decide to leave and start to work in startup?

— I enjoyed working in Mail.Ru Group, every project that I worked on was ambitious. For 6 years, I worked as a team lead in auto.mail.ru and in anti-spam team. Of course, I realized that I won’t probably work on systems as high-load as they were in Mail.Ru Group, but cryptography was my area of interest since university. When I realized that it [cryptography] can finally be implemented in real life and improve various business areas, I decided to leave my previous place of work. Potentially, we want to make a high-load system on Smartz platform and I hope that we will.

— Why did you choose cyber-security as your main field of work?

— Well, I was interested in computers since I was a little kid, in school I was already administrating the whole network at my school. At that time, computer viruses were highly spread, so I learned how systems can be protected. Windows OS was very vulnerable, so there were a lot of opportunities for me to practice in protecting systems and data. Later as a postgraduate, I developed a couple of programs. These systems really worked and I am quite proud of that.

— You were lecturer in a university, now you teach various online courses and master-classes. Why is teaching interesting to you and do you have to take on the role of mentor for younger developers, who work on Smartz platform?

— I always enjoyed teaching, started it when I was in high school. I was a tutor then, helped people with mathematics, physics and computer science. After the university, I was a lecturer in National Research Nuclear University MEPhI and today I teach cyber-security in Bauman Moscow State Technical University. On Smartz platform, I don’t need to use my teaching skills, because every member of research and developers’ team is a professional and has a huge work experience. Age doesn’t matter in our area. What’s good about my work as lecturer for Smartz platform, is that it can be sort of recruitment drive for the project. One of our developers, Algys, used to be my student.

— Why do you believe that smart contracts will improve businesses and which areas you see as the most interested in implementation of smart contracts?

— I always say and will say it now. People have to understand that the Blockchain and smart contracts with it is just the new type of software. From my point of view, it’s not the new money, there are no miracles inside these technologies. People, who work on big systems understand that everything comes with a price and you have to pay for decentralization. Blockchain is a technology that is hard for understanding for a developer, but it’s one of the easiest to understand for a user. Smart contracts are really useful when we talk about processes like accounting, netting, because these processes waste resources from companies today and here is the technology that will ease up these processes for them.

Smart contracts also allow businesses to do almost nothing to support IT infrastructure. In the future, all that companies will need in terms of IT infrastructure is the web-site and certain Blockchain. If a company has IT processes within itself, with smart contracts this company can do it without building its own IT infrastructure. It saves a lot of money for companies, it makes IT processes whole lot easier. It will take a lot of time to switch from the old system to the new one, it even might be painful for some companies, but this type of software is the technology that will be needed in the near future.

— We asked Yuri this question two weeks ago, now we want to ask you, what do you think about this. What must be changed for the global acceptance of smart contracts, by both governments and people?

— Cyber-security now becomes as vital as physical, so first thing that has to change for people is the way that they store their own data. I am absolutely sure that basic cryptography must be taught in school, it will explain people what is the public key and what is the secret key. Without this understanding it’s impossible to use decentralized systems. People have to understand that protection of their accounts is their responsibility.

Talking about governments, Blockсhain is not always useful for them. I think that governments are centralized systems and it’s hard to change that. It would have been great if governments stopped taking all security keys and started issuing them instead. What I am talking about is providing cyber-security for citizens and providing them decentralization, when we talk about owning property, paying taxes. Sooner or later it will happen.

— Many people believe that the Blockchain is invincible to attacks, is it really so?

— Of course not. It’s a software and has vulnerabilities as well. The thing is that it is more protected than systems that people are used to know. Mainly because there are less possibilities for a hacker to penetrate a system, that works on the Blockchain. Basically, with Blockchain, their only two points that can be attacked are the computer and server, with the old system there are more points vulnerable to the attacks.

— The last question is personal. What are your interests despite work?

— First interest is connected to computers, because I like videogames, but I don’t have much time to play, so I crack them and do speed runs. I enjoy roller-skating, fishing and composing music. I have a midi keyboard and compose electronic music.

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