Hank Korth has watched a lot of distributed systems cycles come and go. 

A professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University — with an appointment in the business college and as the lead at Lehigh Blockchain — he has been thinking about networked systems since the late 1980s, when his database research examined how independently administered systems could transact across a network. 

On this episode of Exponential, he joined the show to talk about where his students and research team are concentrating their attention now: zero-knowledge acceleration, onchain privacy that can coexist with regulation, and the agentic era beginning to take shape beneath the headlines.