Narula directs the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. The group's own profile states that she sits on the board of directors of Block and on the Innovation Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that she received her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2015 for work on fast, scalable databases, and that she was previously a senior software engineer at Google.
Her public argument is usually a corrective one. In interviews published by the DCI she has made the case that central bank digital currencies and stablecoins differ less than people assume, that zero-knowledge proofs are not by themselves a privacy solution, and that Project Hamilton, the DCI's central bank payment system research with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, left important questions open. She has also discussed the longer-term risks she sees for Bitcoin, naming advances in quantum computing, the shrinking block subsidy, and scaling without losing self-custody.