The 2020 SNARKy People to Watch List [Part 1]
By Pranay Mohan
The first part of our 2020 series was all about predictions for what happens in the years to come.
In case you missed that list, our 5 predictions were:
SNARK proving time will decrease
More of today’s existing protocols will adopt SNARKs on layer 2 and new protocols will emerge that are SNARK-native.
Tooling around SNARKs will improve
Large companies will begin experimenting with SNARKs
SNARK FUD will rise
But events don’t happen without people. With that in mind, we’re thrilled to bring you our watch list of 6 people we expect to have a big impact on SNARKs in the year to come.
We’ve split the list into two parts, so without further ado, here are the first batch of the 2020 SNARKy People Watch List.
Dev Ojha
Dev is an up-and-coming researcher at the University of California Berkeley College of Engineering with a focus on SNARK constructions. He researches with Blockchain at Berkeley as well as Tendermint. In 2019, he was one of the co-authors of “Fractal: Post-Quantum and Transparent Recursive Proofs from Holography.”
LinkedIn
Read the Fractal research paper
Ariel Gabizon
Ariel is a prolific contributor to the zk-SNARK space. He worked as a cryptographic engineer with Zcash and most recently was a researcher at Protocol Labs, exploring how SNARKs could be used for proof of replication, aka how to succinctly prove to someone you have multiple copies of a certain file. He is now the Chief Scientist at AZTEC Protocol.
LinkedIn
Alex Gluchowski
Alex is the CEO of Matter Labs, a company focused on using zk-SNARKs to improve Ethereum and accelerate mass adoption. Matter Labs is doing tons of interesting and important work, but we think they’re especially poised for big contributions in the coming year as Ethereum looks to zk Rollups to improve scalability.
LinkedIn
Read more about the ZK Sync proposal