Harriet Cao, co-founder of IrisNet and founder of Bianjie AI, offers a rich perspective on the evolution of blockchain, its interplay with AI, and the unique dynamics of the decentralized world, drawing from her extensive background in enterprise technology and her current role as a startup leader. Her journey into blockchain began after over sixteen years leading IBM Research in Shanghai, where her work focused on heavy computing, data, and enterprise applications. She found herself driven by an "urge" to see a more direct impact of technology on industry, leading her to seek a path where she could "define what you want to do" and have "a more direct impact." Harriet's initial excitement about blockchain in 2016 stemmed from her belief that it was "the perfect foundation to support all these requirements such as collaboration and privacy protection." However, she quickly recognized the immaturity of early blockchain for real-world applications. With support from angel investors like Wenxiang Blockchain, her team adopted Tendermint, eventually productizing their foundational service layer into IrisNet. Her personal decision to transition from a secure, resource-rich corporate environment to a startup in the decentralized space was driven by a desire for greater autonomy and impact. While acknowledging the efficiency of large corporations in providing resources, she finds "great power of the decentralized world" where people are "tied together by the vision by the values they focus on," fostering "more efficient collaboration." However, she also notes the "lack of efficiency" that can arise when individual interests diverge, causing execution to falter. Despite this, she feels "more self-realized" in the decentralized sphere. Regarding IrisNet's structure, Harriet clarifies that while Iris Foundation is a non-profit entity managing resources for the project, Bianjie is a for-profit technology company in China, responsible for development and supporting its employees. This mirrors the Cosmos ecosystem's structure with ICF and Tendermint Inc. She strongly advocates for a multi-hub architecture within Cosmos, rejecting the idea of a single central point of failure, stating, "we don't want to have another central just one hub." Iris Hub aims "to be a good citizen of the internet of blockchains," collaborating with other hubs to provide "enhanced security to the network." Beyond this, Iris Hub offers "unique values" by supporting "complicated distributed business applications which involve the heavy computing is not only just can be solved by on-chain logics." The Iris service layer (iService) is key to this, facilitating off-chain computation and integration with other blockchains, a capability increasingly recognized for its power. While being "very open to every collaborators from anywhere," Iris Hub currently sees a natural focus on supporting projects in the Asia-Pacific region due to geographical proximity, offering specialized modules like coin swap and multi-assets to cater to heavy applications. Harriet's background in AI, including robotics at Carnegie Mellon, influenced Bianjie's original name. Although the initial vision involved using blockchain for "distributed data exchange and analytics" in AI, her team realized the necessity of building foundational infrastructure first. Today, Bianjie focuses on IrisNet development and consortium blockchains for enterprises, which involve significant data processing and privacy computing. She believes that AI and blockchain work best together in "application specific blockchains" rather than generic frameworks. In practice, her approach involves "data crunching work as the off-chain processing service and for on chain we just use that to collaborate and to coordinate the results and make like the interaction can be trustworthy." Bianjie also develops Areta, an "enterprise version of Iris Hub," tailored as a consortium blockchain product. Areta addresses specific enterprise needs such as ID management, certificate authority, and privacy computing through edge and pre-servers for secure data storage. This is particularly relevant in China, where, as Harriet notes, KYC (Know Your Customer) is a requirement for enterprise applications to enhance "safety and security," allowing clear identification of service providers and users. She also highlights that current blockchain applications in China are "tokenless," though she remains "very optimistic" about the future, believing that "when people understand the technology better and then they will be more open to adopt it." She observes that blockchain adoption in China, even in its consortium form, is already "adding in more transparency and efficiency into the interactions." Iris SDK and Areta are being used in real-world applications. For instance, they built a healthcare data exchange with Fosun, a major Chinese healthcare conglomerate, where iService facilitates heavy off-chain computing. Another project involved a supply chain finance blockchain for a manufacturing company, where account payables and invoices become non-fungible assets, providing liquidity for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to secure loans. In terms of governance, Iris Hub, learning from Cosmos Hub's design, also has a community pool. Beyond this, a significant "35 percent of the Iris token" is reserved "for the community development." These tokens are explicitly earmarked to "support the related application development or community development" and cannot be sold by the foundation. IrisNet actively supports grant programs for validators, community builders, and application development. Harriet’s passion for technology stems from her love of maths and physics, describing herself as "engineering oriented" and enjoying "the process of learning all these new things and also especially building the seasonal work." When asked about exciting blockchain projects outside of the Cosmos ecosystem, she mentions Solana for its innovative consensus design, Near for its high performance, and PlatON, a project focused on privacy computing, which she hopes to integrate as a service for other blockchains. Her insights underscore a pragmatic yet optimistic vision for blockchain's future, emphasizing specialized solutions, collaborative growth, and real-world impact.