All work

Layer-1 · Consensus · 2016–2021

Dash

Lead backend & principal protocol engineering

Top-5cryptocurrency by market cap (~$10B)
Overview

Dash was, at its peak, a top-five cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, roughly $10 billion, with the adversarial threat model that comes with it. Over five years at Dash Core Group, I rose from Lead Backend Developer to Principal DashPay Developer, owning the systems most exposed to attack. The headline contribution was co-inventing ChainLocks: an LLMQ-based consensus mechanism that made 51% chain-reorganisation attacks economically and practically infeasible. Work whose primitives have since been reused across more than $350 billion of projects. Alongside it came DAPI, the decentralised API that let light clients talk to the network without trusting a single server, and leadership of the SDK and DashPay wallet teams. When critical vulnerabilities were disclosed, the same hands ran the crisis response. This is the bar everything I ship is measured against.

What I did
  • Co-invented ChainLocks, consensus tech later reused across $350B+ of projects
  • Architected DAPI, the decentralised API layer, and led wallet & SDK teams
  • Ran crisis response on critical security disclosures