Sreeram Kannan

Sreeram Kannan is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eigen Labs, the Seattle-based company behind EigenLayer, a protocol that allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum's security through a mechanism called restaking. He has held the CEO role since July 2021. EigenLayer enables ETH stakers to make their capital available to secure additional blockchains and protocols, earning supplementary rewards in return. The protocol attracted over $10 billion in assets under management within its early months of operation and has been cited as a factor in revitalising decentralised finance on Ethereum. Kannan has also described a broader initiative called EigenCloud, positioned as verifiable cloud infrastructure for what he terms the agentic era, backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Concurrently, Kannan holds an Associate Professor position at the University of Washington, where he has been based since November 2014, conducting research in information sciences with applications spanning blockchains, AI, wireless systems, and computational biology. Prior to joining UW, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley from October 2012 to October 2015, focusing on information-theoretic methods in computational biology, specifically RNA sequencing assembly. Before that, he completed graduate research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Master of Science in Mathematics in 2011 and a PhD in information theory and wireless networks in 2012. His doctoral work centred on network information theory. He grew up in Chennai, India, completed his undergraduate degree at the College of Engineering, Guindy, and moved to the United States in 2008.