Web3 and the Metaverse are about enabling ownership. While women in the past were marginalized, web3 presents an opportunity for women to drive change for all of society. How people interact and engage is about to change forever – women can establish themselves in this movement of ownership and the proceeds of a coming future. Sonal Patel recognized this momentous opportunity.
A background in Consulting and Digital Transformation helped her identify her key skills and interests early on: being the person between business and technical teams and focusing on advanced technologies. Sonal discovered the potential of web3 technology and how it weaved together with existing technical and functional processes to reveal new capabilities. She now passionately drives forward the use and understanding of web3 technologies. As Head of Operations for ConsenSys Mesh’s Research & Development unit and leader of the Baseline R&D team, she focuses on the enterprise adoption of the Baseline Protocol and adjacent technologies, such as zero-knowledge cryptography and distributed ledger technology and developing operational strategies for the other research teams.
From Sonal’s perspective, “the Metaverse is a virtual reality that incorporates existing technologies for a novel, immersive, and all encompassing experience.”
With her conviction that web3 isn’t going to replace the internet but rather expand and enhance its capabilities, Sonal recognizes the opportunities to drive meaningful progression. “I see the Metaverse impacting all major spaces where technology is the backbone in work processes – which is evidently all of them. It will create opportunities to learn from and collaborate with people you would not typically get the chance to, in ways that you would not normally be able to. The Metaverse combines existing technologies (such as IoT, AI, ML, etc.) into one, single experience.”
Building trust in a trustless technology – such as a decentralized internet– means developing tools and resources around standards that properly use the technologies and enable interoperability.
How Sonal drives this change is significant. She has a forward-thinking approach to solving problems in the space. Sonal helps teams of researchers and developers create operational processes and strategies in the web3 ecosystem to function seamlessly. She leads an R&D team focusing on the Baseline Protocol and adjacent technologies to help major enterprises implement the novel technology.
Sonal and her team are enabling adoption of a standard method for validating data and synchronizing workflows with counterparties under zero-knowledge, while keeping data in systems of record, implementing the key tenets of web3. It might sound technical because it is. Part of her ConsenSys MeshR&D unit’s work focus on core topics in web3 such as digital identity, verifiable credentials, and state channels to multiply their research and technical contributions by developing opensource frameworks, leading communities, and creating reusable resources across the ecosystem.
Sonal states, “The rise of decentralized communities, protocols and practices creates a strong need for operational integrity since the work is usually voluntary and unprecedented for those involved. Because of this, I’ve been formalizing and optimizing processes in the open-source Baseline Protocol community to ultimately share and apply these innovative practices across other web3 projects to contribute to their success and longevity.
As Co-chair of the Ethereum Training Quality workgroup in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), she supports creating standards for educational resources in the web3 ecosystem. Sonal is also on the committee for the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium (C4) in the Certified Ethereum Professional program, which educates and certifies individuals to provide neutral educational resources on web3 technologies.
What excites her about the future of this space? “I’m excited to have a hand in enterprise adoption in the use of the technology, that isn’t the most ‘exciting’ or ‘revolutionary’ shift, but the proper use of the technology. I’m very inspired by the passionate people in the web3 space, the overwhelming majority working in it agree with the core tenets and goals of web3 around decentralization, and embody it in their work. It’s also very inspiring how intelligent those you come across are, with vast, significant, and surprising backgrounds.”
Sonal says one of the challenges she faces is skewed perspectives of web3 technology and believes it hinders mass adoption of web3 and the Metaverse.
“Some people are trying to forcefully make people and companies learn about or use the technology, instead of just viewing it as a technical concept that only SOME people need to know about – depending on their work.” Sonal remarks that many emerging companies in the space attempt to beat rivals to market in ways that reduce the quality of engineering practices, proper product plans, and general best practices because they prioritize revenue and users. Concerns about the feasibility and safety of new companies and products in the space are constantly rising as companies navigate significant security issues where users lose money and trust.
Sonal hopes to leave a legacy of having a hand at remediating these challenges by creating reusable frameworks for operations and strategies in this open source shift to take ideas from Proof Of Concept (POC), Minimum Viable Product (MVP), to full adoption.
You can take her word for the web3 and the Metaverse space on career possibilities: “The space is growing fast, the tech is advancing fast, and more people are dabbling in the technology daily – of course, there are opportunities!”
SONAL PATEL’S WEB3 AND METAVERSE ADVICE
