It is on a bittersweet note that we announce that George Tankersley is leaving the Foundation.
George has been a part of the Zcash community for nearly three years. Prior to working at the Foundation, George assisted in the final stages of Sapling development and designed the shielded light wallet protocol as a cryptographic engineer at the Electric Coin Company.
As director of engineering, George worked with our team of engineers to set our 2020 roadmap. He also managed the team, and worked with them to develop new engineering processes. The results that the team accomplished during this time are:
- The newly redesigned Zebra node
- FROST, a new design that will enable shielded threshold and multi-signatures for Sapling and other blockchains that use Schnorr signatures
- A new threat model and assessment of network privacy in Zcash, as well as research funding that will improve Tor for Zcash’s needs.
- Foundation-led ecosystem projects, including a memory-safe rewrite of the network’s DNS seeders that George wrote.
- Grant prioritization and process improvements, which have lead to funding diverse improvements to the privacy ecosystem around Zcash such as Zecwallet, Walking Onions, Zbay, and shielded hardware wallet support.
- Developing the Foundation’s technical hiring process
We’d like to thank George for his contributions at the Foundation and for setting a path for our ongoing mission, and wish him luck on future adventures!