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Danny Willems

Head of Cryptography (Architect) & Rust Node Team Lead

Professional Experience

o1Labs
Head of Cryptography (Architect) & Rust Node Team Lead
Senior Cryptography Engineer

o1Labs is a global and remote company that incubated the Mina Protocol. Our team operates on the cutting edge of Web3 and zero-knowledge-proofs.

LeakIX
Co-founder/CEO

LeakIX is the first platform combining a search engine indexing public information by scanning Internet and an open reporting platform linked to the results. We intent to provide a preemptive solution by trusting individual researchers and security companies on the most sensible data we index by delivering a clear report on the incidents, we also help to identify what information has/could be affected and how to resolve the issue. Our first goal is one of prevention, all the voluntary reports are free and no sales attempts are made on LeakIX’s side. We ban sales attempt that would take advantage of the issue to sell shady security services.

Nomadic Labs
Cryptography Engineer

Nomadic Labs are Tezos blockchain experts. Working on the core development, evolution and adoption of the Tezos protocol in BENELUX. Working in the cryptography team, focusing on the development on zero-knowledge protocols, mainly the project Epoxy, a validity rollup for the Tezos protocol.

B2C2
Blockchain Lead & Software Engineer

Lead developer/engineer on the accounting system (partially the risk system), including a real time crypto/FIAT transaction detection across multiple blockchains. Managing the infrastructure, the development, the release and the new features around the blockchain and accounting projects. Working on some parts of the trading system too. In general, participating in the main developer tasks. B2C2 is a leading cryptocurrency marketmaker. Brokers, exchanges, hedge funds and family offices around the world trust us to deliver seamless execution in the major cryptocurrencies and fiat currency pairs.

Be Sport
Intern

Social network around sports. The platform is built using OCaml and the Ocsigen technology. During the internship, I was responsible to improve the framework Ocsigen Start, which consists of a template to bootstrap a complete standard applications require users management, displaying tips, sending notifications to the users.

Selfpharma
Cordova Mobile Application Engineer

Online pharmacy shop based in Brussels, Belgium, built using Prestashop. Leading the iOS and Android mobile applications development, written in Cordova.

INRIA Paris
Research Intern - Gallium Team

Research internship in the Gallium team, focusing on module systems in functional programming languages.

Education

Master's Degree Mathematics and Computer Sciences @ University of Mons

Grade: Summa Cum Laude

Bachelor degree: minor in Physics. Awarded with the price of the Mathematics Department.

Piscine C @ 42

Piscine C in July 2014, joined in 2015. Stopped 1 year after to focus on master degree in mathematics at UMONS.

Research Publications

New Design Techniques for EfficientArithmetization-Oriented Hash Functions: Anemoi Permutations and JiveCompression Mode
Clémence Bouvier and Pierre Briaud and Pyrros Chaidos and Léo Perrin andRobin Salen and Vesselin Velichkov and Danny Willems
New optimization techniques for PlonK'sarithmetization
Miguel Ambrona, Anne-Laure Schmitt, Raphael R. Toledo, and Danny Willems
PDF
To a typed language for modular programming
Danny Willems, master thesis directed by François Pottier

Public Talks

ZK11: o1VM: Building a Real-World zkVM for MIPS
Danny Willems
A zkVM for the MIPs architecture and OP fault proofs
Danny Willems
ZKProof5 - Anemoi & Jive: New Arithmetization-Oriented tools for Plonk app
Clémence Bouvier and Danny Willems

Notable Open Source Contributions

Octez: an OCaml implementation of the Tezos protocol (Dec 2019 - Present)
ocaml-bls12-381: an efficient OCaml implementation of the pairing-friendly curve BLS12-381 (January 2020 - Present)
ocaml-bls12-381-hash: efficient C and OCaml implementation of hash functions over the scalar field of BLS12-381 (Aug. 2022 - Present)
ocaml-bls12-381-signature: OCaml implementation of BLS signature for BLS12-381 (June 2021 - Present)
Plompiler: a monadic Domain Specific Language embedded in OCaml than can be used to build circuits for aPlonK (2021 - Present)