The story
Dr Luke Riley joined Quant in September 2019 as Head of Innovation, recruited from King’s College London to lead Quant Labs and the research behind Overledger — the blockchain-agnostic API gateway. Verdian’s public welcome called the brief ‘revolutionise Overledger technology.’ Seven years on, the papers attached to his name are how this encyclopedia tells the product story: a taxonomy of interoperability options, an ACM article that puts Overledger in the gateway cell, and a 2026 note that turns those workflows into tools an AI agent can call.
The academic years came first. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool and worked there as a Knowledge Transfer Associate on AI-based distributed systems. At King’s College London he spent three years as a Computer Science Research Associate on decentralised voting, proof-of-stake consensus and smart contracts — the 2021 Foundations and Trends monograph with Dhillon, Kotsialou and McBurney, and the 2018 AAMAS paper on shareholder rights. Those are KCL papers, not Overledger features. They are why a computer scientist who had already thought about what a ledger can and cannot record was the hire for Quant Labs.
Specialist areas Quant lists: atomic swaps, cross-chain asset migrations, tokens, privacy-preserving payments, layer-two channels. In 2021 he published the Quant research note ‘DLT interoperability: what are the options?’ and walked the same taxonomy in a Hyperledger webinar. In 2022 he co-created King’s College’s beginner course for Overledger developers. In 2023 he co-authored, with Rafael Belchior (then at Quant) and Thomas Hardjono (MIT), the ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies paper that remains the academic statement of the gateway category. In 2025 he supervised UCL work adapting SATP from transfer to exchange. In 2026 he published Flow Applications — every Overledger workflow auto-exposing MCP tool definitions — and a note on the Overledger and Fusion firewall. Deep Knowledge Analytics and the Big Innovation Centre named him a key influencer in 2021. He has spoken in UK All-Party Parliamentary Groups. Read the ACM paper and the options note before the product page.