In this Q&A feature with Finance Day, Erick Watson discusses his journey from Google and Microsoft to co-founding Randamu, the company’s core technology, and his vision for the future of decentralized infrastructure.
Watson explains that Randamu focuses on “secure bridgeless multi-chain interoperability,” coordinating actions across blockchains using threshold cryptography and on-chain verification rather than vulnerable bridge intermediaries. The interview covers practical applications of threshold cryptography, including decentralized key sharing, automation, randomness for gaming and DeFi, and time-lock encryption for sealed-bid auctions and private voting through the dcipher.network platform.
A key topic is the Threshold Association, a Switzerland-based organization Watson co-founded to establish neutral governance standards for threshold cryptography, modeled after the early Internet Engineering Task Force. Watson also discusses the company’s successful $3.3M pre-seed raise led by Protocol Labs Venture Studios and addresses the common misconception that asset bridging is the only path to interoperability.
Topics Covered
- Why Watson left Big Tech for blockchain entrepreneurship
- How bridgeless interoperability eliminates bridge vulnerabilities
- The Threshold Association and decentralized governance standards
- Practical applications of time-lock encryption and threshold cryptography
- Randamu’s business model balancing open-source and commercial support