Please indicate if you are running to be the Council Lead or a Council Member:
Council Member
Does this nomination represent an individual or organization:
Open Source Observer
Candidate country of residence (or, if an entity, incorporation and principle place of business):
United States of America
Have you previously served on Optimism’s Security Council:
No
Have you previously served on any other Council or Board in the Collective:
No
Are you a representative of OP Labs:
No
Are you a representative of another OP Chain:
No
If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate profile:
If you are a member of the Citizens’ House, please link to your most recent attestation here:
Please outline your contributions, and their impact, to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
Through our work on Open Source Observer, we have been dedicated to growing the impact of the Optimism ecosystem with retrofunding. We have been working with the Optimism ecosystem for about a year, building scalable data pipelines, collecting diverse data sets, building impact models/metrics, and distributing it all as a public good for the collective. For more on our latest work with RF4, see this blog post:
Please demonstrate any non-Optimism experience you believe is relevant to this role:
I was the co-founder & CTO of Oasis Labs, an L1 chain that supported privacy-preserving smart contracts. I led the product and engineering teams that built the distributed protocol, and later deployed to a decentralized network of validators.
Please elaborate on your technical background, including your github handle (this will be used to calculate your github expertise score and will be added to your nomination before it goes to a vote by the Foundation):
I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington, specializing in distributed systems and applied cryptography. I co-founded multiple projects that are now used by millions of people. In addition to my work at Oasis Labs, I also:
- Led and grew the engineering team at Plasmic, a low-code frontend builder
- Co-founded a networking project that was productionized by Google into Outline, and now used by people around the world to get access to the free and open Internet.
Please elaborate on your experience with relevant member (or Lead) requirements:
When I was the technical leader of Oasis, I was responsible for both building and deploying the L1 protocol. This included communicating with validators, designing for robustness in a diverse heterogeneous deployments, and securely managing keys for the team and protocol.
Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Security Council member:
I have always taken operational security very seriously. This typically involves a defense-in-depth strategy, thinking through potential threat vectors from a holistic view, in which the human is typically the weakest link. I’ve studied this theoretically as an academic, publishing papers at security conferences. I’ve handled this in practice during my time running engineering teams. And I look forward to applying these diverse experiences to keep Optimism humming smoothly. In my opinion, good visibility and strong proactive communication are table stakes. No system is perfect, and we should expect occasional failures. A good defense-in-depth strategy allows us to mitigate the downsides of failures, giving us the room to diagnose systemic issues. When I led post-mortems in the past, we held them with a no-fault ethos, recognizing that the system must design for human fallibility.
Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:
N/A
Please verify that you understand you may be removed from this role via the Representative Removal proposal type in the Operating Manual:
I understand
Please verify that you understand that election is subject to successful completion of a Foundation screen which may include KYC/AML, sanctions screening, and a requirement to sign a standard contract: [No/Yes]
Yes
Please verify that you are able to commit ~5 active hours / month to fulfill the Member Responsibilities. Please note that there is an “on-call” aspect to this role that is not fully encompassed in the active hours estimate: [No/Yes]
Yes