After two years as the Zcash Foundation’s Principal Cryptographic Researcher, Henry de Valence is stepping down.
Henry was the Zcash Foundation’s first technical hire and left a deep imprint on our work. He designed the architecture of Zebra, the Zcash Foundation’s independent implementation of the Zcash protocol and consensus rules. Zebra has a modern Rust codebase, is memory-safe and multithreaded, and uses an asynchronous verification architecture to allow transparent batch verification of proof data. Because Zebra is written as a collection of modular component libraries, it will be the foundation of our future engineering projects.
Henry also worked to design network privacy solutions for Zcash, to identify and fix inconsistencies in the Zcash specification, and helped organize the cryptography community to design privacy-preserving systems for contact tracing and exposure notification in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many thanks to Henry for his contributions to the Foundation and for architecting a strong technical foundation for our ongoing mission. We are eager to see what Henry’s future will bring.