I’m a research scientist at Protocol Labs. I mostly work on efficient zero-knowledge proof systems and other cryptography-flavored topics.

I previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University with Claudio Orlandi (2020-2021) and at the IMDEA Software Institute with Dario Fiore (2018-2020).

While at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), I worked with Rosario Gennaro; in 2018 both Rosario and CUNY made the careless blunder of giving me a PhD.

Research

You can find a full list of publications on my Google Scholar page.

In some of my latest projects I worked on questions as:

SNARKs and Such

Witness-Encryption-like Primitives

  • Encryption to the Future: How can we emulate WE to pass state long-term in decentralized networks? [paper]
  • How to simply approximate witness encryption through witness-authenticated key exchange? [paper]
  • Witness Encryption over Succinct Functional Commitments [paper]

On Theory for Cryptographic Proofs

  • What are theoretical limits for extractable arguments with nice composability features? [paper] [slides]
  • How much can we push designated-verifier primitives to achieve some level of public-verifiability (in a certain setting)? [paper]

Efficient Proofs in Cryptocurrencies

  • How can we obtain efficient anonymous payments from well-studied assumptions? [Veksel paper] [Veksel code]
  • How (not) to pay for digital goods and services on Bitcoin? [paper]
  • How to construct Zero-Knowledge on Homomorphic commitments to KV maps (a “Z-KeyWee”, or Z🥝) and how to use them for anonymous cryptocurrencies? [paper]

Rationality and Fine-Grained Cryptography

ZK Standards

I am co-chair of the working group leading the effort to standardize (commit/encrypt)-and-prove in zero-knowledge proofs. Some resources:

Teaching