Most consultants are one of these. Mike Norman is all three.
With a PhD in Complex Systems Science and a BSc in Computer Systems Engineering, Mike has spent 15+ years studying how emergent behavior arises in decentralized systems. Then building production systems that leverage it. He held Top Secret clearances supporting DoD and DHS missions for over a decade.
As Director of Token Economics at Consensys, he designed token incentive structures and mechanism models for protocols across the Ethereum ecosystem. He published the first academic work on emergent trust in public blockchain networks, and was among the first to run multi-agent reinforcement learning (PPO) via Unity's ML-Agents framework days after its release.
Now as CSO and co-founder of Shodai + CNS Labs — backed by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin as lead investor, alongside Consensys and Consensys Mesh — he's building coordination protocols for a world where humans and autonomous agents transact as peers.
The edge isn't complexity science as a buzzword. It's 15 years of applying its principles to systems that actually matter, and shipping the results. Today that means running production multi-agent systems across heterogeneous compute, with persistent memory, autonomous monitoring, and human-agent synthesis.
