I’m Konstantin Tkachuk. I build decentralized infrastructure during the day and read political theory at night. Right now I’m Co-Founder and CSO at Titan Network, where we’re building a new incentive layer for global idle resources – an edge cloud provider that serves enterprise platforms like TikTok, Tencent, Cloudflare, ByteDance, and Filecoin at 70-80% less than traditional cloud. 3.5M+ registered nodes across 108+ countries. 29 paying customers. 99.9% SLA. One-day integrations. Backed by Arrington Capital, DePINX, Polygon, Cointelegraph, and Charlie Songhurst.
How I got here
I’m a civil engineer by training – BSc (Honors) from Ural Federal University, MSc from the Technical University of Munich. The plan was bridges and buildings. Then SpaceX ran the Hyperloop competition and my team won it, which reorganized my sense of what was possible to build. I ended up at Tsinghua University for a Master of Management Science in Global Affairs as a Schwarzman Scholar (‘23), which is where the governance research started.
Before Titan, I spent several years at Protocol Labs (YC S14) as a startup operator, scaling the Filecoin ecosystem by roughly 100 startups. That’s where I learned that storage utilization going from 3-4% to 36% is the difference between a protocol and a product. The gap between technology and real demand is where most DePIN projects die, and the ones that survive usually do so because someone did the unglamorous work of integration, enterprise sales, and operational grinding.
What I think about
Four things, mostly.
DePIN and cloud infrastructure. This is home base. How idle resources become enterprise-grade infrastructure. Why node count is a vanity metric and revenue per node isn’t. What actually separates a real DePIN network from a token distribution scheme with a dashboard.
Blockchain governance and legislation. I’ve published research on multistakeholder governance models and did security audit research for Lido’s dual governance. I care about how governments, developers, miners, and users actually negotiate power – not the simplified internal/external split most of the literature settles for.
Enterprise adoption signals. What does real traction look like at the protocol level? Revenue, integration complexity, churn, enterprise procurement cycles. Most industry reports mistake activity for demand.
AI and infrastructure convergence. I’m not an AI-first voice, but the convergence of AI compute demand and decentralized supply is increasingly central to what we build.
Elsewhere
I co-founded an NGO for equal youth access to education. I serve as COO at the Future International Foundation. I advise early-stage DePIN and Web3 teams when the problem is interesting and the founders are serious. I write a monthly newsletter you can subscribe to here.
Education
- Master of Management Science in Global Affairs, Tsinghua University – Schwarzman Scholars Program, Class of 2023
- MSc Civil Engineering, Technical University of Munich
- BSc Civil Engineering (Honors), Ural Federal University
Selected achievements
- SpaceX Hyperloop Competition – winning team
- Scaled Filecoin ecosystem by ~100 startups at Protocol Labs
- Published governance research on Lido’s dual governance security model
- Co-founder, NGO for equal youth access to education
- Titan Network – 3.5M+ nodes, 108+ countries, enterprise partnerships with TikTok, Tencent, Cloudflare, ByteDance
Contact
Want to collaborate, have me speak, or talk infrastructure? Get in touch →