Emily Pillmore is the Head of Core Engineering at Kadena, where she’s helping shape the future of blockchain infrastructure through practical, secure, and scalable solutions. With a background in traditional finance and Wall Street auditing, Emily brings a unique perspective to the decentralized space, rooted not just in technical acumen but also in a deep commitment to financial sovereignty and social impact. In this interview, she reflects on what drew her to crypto during Venezuela’s economic collapse, how Kadena is challenging the current Layer 2 narrative, and why she believes Utah might just be the next great tech frontier.
UBC: What was the moment that blockchain technology really kind of clicked for you, where you thought this is going to change the world?
Emily: Let’s see, so I got into it in 2018. There were a lot of protests at the time, and I seemed to remember Venezuela going through a social collapse at the time, and people started using cryptocurrencies as a means of avoiding the hyperinflation of the currency at the time. It meant that their buying power—specifically for buying flights out of the country—went drastically up, rather than what would have happened if they had stuck with the currency, which was an instant breadline. That, to me, was kind of exemplary of the whole experience, in the sense that, you know, sovereign currencies fail. There needs to be some form of fail-safe that people can lean against in a case where governments aren’t doing their job. And that’s it. That was a big one for me. There are other ones. As an advocate for bodily autonomy, people can get the medicine that they need on whatever grey market or black market they want, and they don’t have to be tracked through some sovereign processor or private banking process in order to do it. Those are important functions to me.
UBC: How did that kind of realization about the use cases for blockchain kind of turn into a full career shift for you?
Emily: I’ve always kind of been in finance. I actually worked on Wall Street—like, literally on Wall Street as an auditor for Banks as a consultant doing their CAR processes, which was the the set of processes that the Basel Accords came up with in order to mitigate something like a 2008 happening again. That sort of safeguarding against, I don’t want to say an evil industry, but a relatively apathetic industry or an industry that can collapse and affect so many people in so many drastic ways has appealed to me for a long time. Crypto is a sort of natural evolution of that sort of momma bear kind of attitude, I think. The United States was always founded on a healthy dialogue between power structures. And throughout the years, everything from at-will employment to the way we form labor unions to the way we vote, the way we’ve structured our government is at its heart to be adversarial in both a defensive and an offensive way. At-will employment is great, banking through credit unions is great because it removes the amount of leverage that any individual corporation or government entity has on your life, and that is a healthy form of protection. I see crypto just as an extension of that. Less so lately, but I think at its core, it is that.
UBC: So what are you working on now and tell us about your different work in the space?
Emily: So right now we’re working on several interesting projects. One, we have decided that every layer 2 has failed. So the best sort of evolution of the defi market is going to be layer ones as a layer two. So what we’re working on right now at Kadena is incorporating ways for people to diversify the platform in which they execute certain common currencies, so things like ethereum. And then using bridging technology to kind of make sure that that those state changes are trapped and you can basically use whatever network you want and that is fastest, that is lowest gaps in order to execute your transactions, and then reflect them back onto whatever the mainnet chain is that you want to reflect those state changes. So for example, if Ehereum is congested because Ethereum can be congested and its gas fees go extremely high, the only solution is more competition in the layer one space for the same currency. Kadena was kind of purpose-built to be this mesh network of approval work chains, and if we wanted to run an EVM, we could have this the whole time. As time goes on, we’re very clearly trending towards the top five layer one’s that are consolidating most of the TVL in the industry. And we need to resign ourselves to the fact that we want to be a part of that, because we have something to offer. We don’t necessarily need our own native token to do it.
UBC: So is Kadena considering retiring the token?
Emily: No. It’ll just exist. There’s no need for it to not exist. It’s an efficient token and the Pact language offers some incredible security on top of the native token. But we also recognize the fact that learning a language is difficult, the incentives are kind of stacked against us because of that consolidation problem that I was talking about before. So we should go to where people are already instead of trying to get them to come to us.
UBC: Speaking of Pact, you played a pretty heavy hand in the development of that. I’d love to hear about your work there.
Emily: When I started [working at Kadena], I was the Senior developer of Pact, answering to Stuart Popejoy, one of our founders, and I built out several features for the language. He had already come up with a skeleton for the language, but we built out several features together and then launched in 2019, so I was there for like a year before we launched. And since then, I’ve written the contract. I’m the developer for Kadena’s token. And I’ve had a hand in a lot of DeFi projects that leaned on that token over the following years. I was an advisor, and did consulting work for Kadena, and more recently, I’ve been the head of the core engineering team. Basically I’ve been here a long time, I know how the standard should go, and I want to see Kadena succeed.
UBC: Could you give a quick blurb on how you would describe Kadana as it is today for anyone who may not have heard about it?
Emily: Yeah, think about it like an optimized Ehereum, except there’s 20 of them. They can run in parallel, and they can share information between them through a native bridging solution.
UBC: So it speeds up the blockchain’s processing power significantly, but also doesn’t compromise the security?
Emily: That’s right. The way we sort of braid history into the mesh of chains requires you to sort of own all 20. A 51% [attack] is actually more like a 66% in our case if we look at the slice of the network that you have to own. So comparing it to Ethereum, it’s more secure, more efficient, and has better storage. We can also spin up new chains as needed, so the storage gets more efficient as we do that. So it’s a multiplier on the size of the database that’s running it underneath. That’s a lot of power, especially because one blockchain is already so powerful. But it’s even more powerful.
UBC: So it’s fast and it’s cheap to use.
Emily: Yeah, it makes gas extremely cheap. There is some overhead in terms of having to track cross-chain stuff. Blockchains can play nicely together only to a point. So, we’re working on improving it. We’re always working on the developer experience and trying to improve our processes.
UBC: What aspects of the sort of blockchain ecosystem is Kadena looking to build within right now? Are you focusing on gaming or B2B services, for example? I’m also curious how you personally see the state of the blockchain industry today. What is its most promising use case to you?
Emily: We’re focusing on DeFi, Web3, and TradFi at the moment. We want to be a settlement layer for big banking. Because there’s stuff that banks need help with, that are inefficient processes that we feel could be advantageous when transacting through our blockchain specifically. Especially the fact that we are relatively fast to finalize transactions, not simply settle. 30 second finality for transactions is fantastic when you think about Mastercard taking two or three days. We’re looking at generally DeFi, more dexes, more stablecoins, more staking opportunities for people. We are working on as many cross-chain and collaborative opportunities as possible to diversify the ecosystem and generally, I think I see this as an industry trend where everyone’s trying to work with everyone else, rather than have their own sort of walled garden, and I kind of like that. As long as Blockchain wins, that’s good.
UBC: The recent legislation in the last couple of weeks will provide more framework for stablecoins. Do you see that as being a positive for the industry?
Emily: I think that’s good. There’s a lot of risk in any one currency. As long as there’s not more war or frivolous lawsuits, I’m happy.
UBC: What’s one thing that you’re most proud of in your career in the blockchain space?
Emily: I think not having to compromise on those ideals [I mentioned before]. That’s been the biggest thing. I can say that I love anonymity and the fact that you can transact anonymously through the blockchain industry and get what you need is cool to me. I can make that case to anyone on the planet who’s been through some shit, and they understand. That’s what blockchain used to be, not whatever finance bro and NFT monkey picture thing that we’re doing. I’m not about the money grabs.
UBC: What brings you to build in Utah? I know Kadena’s not based in Utah, but what makes you want to stay here?
Emily: I grew up here and I actually really like it. I kind of like the Wild West feel. It helps keep my attitude in the right place. You go to New York and everyone’s grinding all the time and looking for whatever’s going to be the next thing. And I’m like, no, I like where I am. I like it here and if I could build something in peace, I’m happy.
UBC: How do you feel about the talent pool in Utah right now? Is there a big community of builders in your eyes?
Emily: I haven’t gone to interact with a ton of builders in the space in Utah specifically, and actually, I was surprised to see that there were blockchain enthusiasts here. If there is a community, I’m happy to see it grow. Definitely.
UBC: Do you think that Utah has the potential to be a top crypto hub, or would you like to see that?
Emily: I would love to. Honestly, no place aside from maybe Austin is better poised to become the new Silicon Valley. And we do need a new Silicon Valley at this point.