Workshop and Brunch with PremFina and Nethermind
You are warmly invited to Weekly Brunches, a series of events held every Saturday. These events aim to provide students with guidance, connections, and support in bringing their ideas to life over the year. The events begin with a brunch, followed by two streams of (1) entrepreneurial and (2) technical workshops. The objective is to bring together students who have diverse backgrounds but share entrepreneurial ambitions, and to support the best projects with opportunities for publication, hackathons, incubation, or other forms of implementation.
Entrepreneurial stream
Bundeep Singh Rangar is a recognized fintech entrepreneur, investor, and deal maker. He has raised over half a billion dollars in equity and debt funding in the UK, Europe, Canada, and India over the past decade. Recently, he celebrated his latest successful raise for his venture, PremFina, with a pilgrimage to Burning Man in the Nevada desert.
Bundeep raised £27 million in debt and equity for his London-based insurtech firm, PremFina. The funding came from Japan's Rakuten Capital, Silicon Valley, UK-based Draper Esprit, Thomvest Ventures, the family office of Canada's Thomson family, shareholders in Thomson Reuters, Emery Capital, and Talis Capital. This funding has positioned PremFina as the leading alternative premium finance provider in the UK.
Apart from his involvement with PremFina, Bundeep is an investor in various fintech companies and has been featured in publications such as Bloomberg News, Forbes, The Telegraph, and The Times. He is a frequent guest on Bloomberg TV, the BBC, CNBC, CNN, and Sky News. Bundeep has also produced his first Bollywood-Hollywood crossover film, Line of Descent.
Technical stream
Swapnil Raj is the Head of Innovation at Nethermind, a blockchain research and software engineering company. Nethermind empowers enterprises and developers worldwide to build on decentralized systems. Their mission is to deliver pioneering research and development that enables accessible, transparent, and borderless economic and governance systems.
The "Scaling Ethereum" workshop addresses the scalability challenges of Ethereum using various strategies and technologies. It begins by exploring the blockchain trilemma, highlighting the difficulty of achieving scalability, security, and decentralisation simultaneously. The workshop then delves into key aspects such as the role of data availability in scaling, different types of rollup architecture (e.g. optimistic and zk-rollups), and a case study on Starknet's implementation of zk-rollups. It also discusses modular blockchains, Cosmos for blockchain interoperability, and DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) based mempools to increase transaction throughput. The workshop additionally covers optimisation strategies like parallelism, access lists, and STM (Software Transactional Memory). You will gain a deep understanding of blockchain scalability challenges and potential solutions, making this workshop ideal for developers and blockchain enthusiasts interested in the technical details of scaling Ethereum.
The events are co-hosted with Cambridge Blockchain Society.
For more information, join the Weekly Brunches Telegram group.
TICKETS: to attend the workshop, please message the Weekly Brunches Telegram group
WHEN: Saturday 17 February 2024, 12 - 2pm
WHERE: King's College, Cambridge
