Greg Osuri is a technology entrepreneur and the CEO of Akash Network. He is known for his work in the blockchain and cloud computing space, particularly in the development and promotion of Akash Network as a cost-effective and decentralized alternative to traditional cloud services. ^[1]

Career

Greg Osuri's first job was at Miracle Software Systems, a global IT services company from May 2004 to June 2006. He assumed the position of Technical Architect, working on designing and maintaining the network. ^[6]

Starting in June 2006, Osuri worked as a Consultant at IBM in the Greater Nashville Area, focusing on Critical Infrastructure and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) Consulting. During his two-year tenure, he specialized in verticals such as Automotive, Logistics, Healthcare, and Telecom, serving notable clients including Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Blue Cross Blue Shield, WebMD, and JP Morgan Chase. ^[6]

Following this, Osuri founded SBILabs Corp in March 2008, based in the Greater Nashville Area. As the Founder, he contributed to Cloud Infrastructure development and operational strategies for approximately a year and seven months. ^[6]

In May 2008, Osuri took on the role of Architect (Consulting) in the Intranet Portfolio at Kaiser Permanente in the San Francisco Bay Area. His responsibilities included architectural consulting within the healthcare organization, contributing to the Intranet Portfolio. ^[6]

Transitioning to Gridbag in September 2009, Osuri served as the Founder and VP Engineering for approximately one year and nine months. In this capacity, he played a crucial role in the company's engineering leadership and development efforts. ^[6]

From May 2011 to January 2013, Osuri worked as a Lead Architect at Marketron in the San Francisco Bay Area, contributing to architectural design and strategy. ^[6]

In November 2011, Osuri founded AngelHack, where he served as Founder and CTO for one year and nine months. AngelHack became a global developer ecosystem with over 50,000 developers in 50 cities. Additionally, Osuri created hackathon.io, a suite of tools designed to manage logistical complexity for running distributed hackathons worldwide. ^[6]

In June 2015, Osuri founded Overclock Labs, the creators of Akash Network, where he currently serves as the Founder and CEO. Since then, he has led the company in establishing a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling cloud computing resources and developing a deployment platform optimized for heavily distributed applications. ^[6]

Akash Network

In 2018, Greg Osuri and Adam Bozanich got together to work on Akash Network, an open and decentralized cloud computing marketplace. His vision was to democratize cloud computing by creating a global marketplace for computing resources, allowing users to share and access server capacity and cloud services in a peer-to-peer fashion. Akash Network aims to offer a cost-effective alternative to traditional cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.^[4]

Contributions and Impact

Under Greg Osuri's leadership, Akash Network has garnered significant attention in the blockchain and cloud computing sectors. He uses his platform to address the issues of centralization and cost inefficiency within the cloud computing industry, offering a decentralized and more cost-effective solution. Greg is a frequently featured speaker and was instrumental in the passing of California’s first Blockchain bill (AB 2658) providing the first expert-witness testimony at the Senate. In his testimony, he said:

Blockchain technology is in its infancy, but its potential impact on and benefits for commerce rivals that of the world wide web itself. And as with web technology, California is at the forefront of innovation. We’re grateful to the legislature for its leadership in protecting and educating consumers as this innovation proceeds at ever-increasing speed.

In my opinion, expanding UETA’s definitions of “electronic record” and “electronic signature” to include a record or a signature that is secured through blockchain technology is a no-brainer. Why? Because blockchain is inherently immutable and auditable. In other words, once a record is written to a blockchain, it is there forever; it cannot be altered, and it is visible to anyone with access to the chain. A blockchain is a database that cannot be hacked.

Furthermore, security is baked in using cryptography. When I sign a record with my public key, it is unalterably attributed to me on the blockchain. This is because a cryptographic key is actually a pair of keys — a public key seen by everyone joined mathematically to a private key seen only by me. So a bad actor cannot hack a database to steal my password because my private key never leaves my computer.

However, I’d suggest caution regarding smart contracts. Written contracts are often difficult to understand, but they’re at least theoretically human-readable. Smart contracts on the other hand are written in computer code. As a professional software engineer, it can be difficult for me to understand someone else’s code, to say nothing of a layperson’s ability to do so. And of course, code often has bugs which cause unintended behavior. As a result, there is a greater risk of a person committing to a smart contract that has provisions they, or even the contract issuer, do not fully understand. In my opinion, legislation regarding smart contracts must consider these important characteristics.^[5]