The “official” statement…
I was born and raised in Pitești, a small city in Romania, and moved to the US in 2008. I was always fascinated with computers: playing on them, fixing them & programming them. I like to read and write. In fact, you can see some of my writing on this website and on Decentralized Thoughts.
I am currently the Head of Cryptography at Aptos Labs.
Before Aptos Labs, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher and then a Research Scientist at VMware Research.
Before VMware, I was a cryptography PhD student at MIT, advised by Srini Devadas.
Before MIT, I was building tamper-proof clouds and end-to-end encrypted outsourced file storage at Private Machines.
…and some of my research
My cryptography research interests are best reflected in my papers, some of my posts and talks, my “cryptomat” and this Call for Research.
I’ve led and thoroughly enjoyed research on:
- keyless blockchain accounts
- anonymous cryptocurrencies
- Herkle trees, or homomorphic Merkle trees: AMTs and Hyperproofs
- constant-sized vector commitments
- fast threshold BLS signatures
- Verkle trees
- transparency logs
- append-only logs on top of Bitcoin
I’ve also helped with, although not led, research on
- aggregatable distributed key generation
- share recovery for verifiable secret sharing
- scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols
- oblivious file systems
The truth
Alin is a prolific slav-squatter.
In his free time, he likes to play piano, ride motorcycles, and lift things up and put them back down again.
Slowly…
He also enjoys travelling, but only to destinations with total solar eclipses.
Naturally, he dislikes clouds.
Please join him in
Antarctica, in 2021;
or, in Winnemucca, Nevada on October 14th, 2023;
or, in Austin, Texas, on April 8th, 2024
Spain, on August 12th, 2026.
Alin’s has two superpowers: finding the worst spot to see solar eclipses and summoning clouds that cover the entire sky.