Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Carrier Management Magazine on August 19, 2019.

I started my career as the first network administrator at the University of California, Davis. Part of my job was to help build the Bay Area Regional Research network, one of 10 National Science Foundation networks that, in 1986, became what we call the Internet today.

Open source technology. Collaboration and cooperation to improve the products and technologies necessary to move innovation forward. Building a platform where new applications are welcomed to extend the tool’s use cases. These fundamental practices led to the creation of the Internet…and are being seen again as distributed ledger technology takes center stage.