Riley Edmunds is the co-founder of Stride Labs, the company that created the Stride blockchain. His experience originally lies in consulting and research, before he moved on to becoming the co-founder of two different firms, one being Stride Labs and the other Alinea.

Education

Riley Edmunds was active in leadership and scholastic roles during his schooling years. When he attended Oak Park & River Forest High School, he was part of the Model UN, Math Team, and Leadership Club.
He later attained his B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Here, he was also part of the Data Bears club and Financial Consulting for Startups at Berkeley club, helping him build the necessary tools for his businesses.^[1]

Career

Edwards' work is deeply tied to Berkeley, his alma-mater. He worked as a Developer at Virtual Reality at Berkeley, a community of Berkeley students that served to increase public awareness of virtual reality. For a year between 2016 and 2017 Fall, he worked on ideating and building a 3D TensorFlow simulation environment in VR to better explain how neural nets work internally. The work was aimed at addressing the inability to clearly visualize and understand deep network architectures. 

He began his work as a researcher, working an internship at Intuit where he was able to submit patent applications based on his work for research in deep semi-supervised architectures and neural language models for fraud detection in event-streams. He worked at ICSI for a year, up to September 2017, as a Deep Learning Researcher, where he worked with Python and C++. He spent another two years at Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities Lab until December 2018 as a Scientific Researcher for robots and locomotion. He moved on to become the Head of Research and Project Manager at Machine Learning at Berkeley.^[2]

Alinea

His first foray into founding a start-up came in February 2018, where he co-founded Alinea, a machine learning consulting group that was connected with research on UC Berkeley's campus. The group folded in June 2019.^[3]

Stride Labs

He co-founded Stride Labs in March 2022 and has been working there for two years up to the present. Its main product is the Stride blockchain which provides liquidity for staked tokens.^[4] It is part of the Cosmos interchain ecosystem. Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent parallel blockchains that can scale and interoperate with one another. Cosmos is built on a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. It uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, in which validators rather than miners validate transactions and verify the accuracy of new blocks.^[6] As to why Stride chose Cosmos to work with, Edmunds claimed the untapped potential during an interview.

"Cosmos has a ton of new tech shipping over the next six months. Ethereum layer-2 solutions lack client-based interoperability and are not as trustless as Cosmos solutions, at least until something like ZK (Zero-Knowledge) L2s is further developed. Cosmos provides both shared security and interoperability right now. L2s have some of the most exciting partnerships in the entire digital asset space, On the Cosmos side, dYdX, a decentralized exchange service that is moving over to Cosmos from Ethereum due to scaling limitations, is coming in. It’s a bunch of pent-up innovation that has been done over the past few years but hasn’t quite shipped yet, and we might see the fruits of that labor in the next three to six months. The impending developments might totally change how Cosmos is experienced and perceived by the broader crypto world. -Riley Edmunds^[7]

Stride can be used to liquid stake one's tokens from any Cosmos chain, earning both staking and DeFi yields from across the Cosmos IBC ecosystem. Users can receive staked tokens immediately when the liquid stake, and rewards will be accumulated in real time to staked token holders. These staked tokens can be freely traded, and can be redeemed with Stride at any time to receive back native tokens plus staking rewards. Currently, Stride supports liquid staking for: Cosmos Hub (stATOM), Osmosis (stOSMO), Injective (stINJ), Stargaze (stSTARS), Evmos (stEVMOS), Terra 2 (stLUNA), Umee (stUMEE), Juno (stJUNO), Comdex (stCMDX), Sommelier (stSOMM).^[5]