News from the Wire

Discreet Labs promotes Warren Paul Anderson to CEO

Friday, June 24, 2022 — 13:22:31 (EDT)

PALO ALTO, CALIF. (PRWEB) JUNE 22, 2022--Discreet Labs is proud to announce the promotion of Warren Paul Anderson into the role of CEO. Previously, Warren held the title of VP of Product at Discreet Labs where he has proven instrumental in helping to develop and launch many technical milestones over the past year on Findora, a high-performance EVM-compatible public blockchain utilizing Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) to bring privacy to Web3.

Warren is a startup founder and a strategic product creative with valuable experience building distributed systems and open protocols using applied cryptography. Before joining Discreet Labs, Warren led crypto products at Ripple for over 4 years, working on open protocols such as XRP Ledger, Interledger, & PayString, the RippleX developer platform, and RippleNet's On-Demand Liquidity enterprise product.

Prior to Ripple, in 2014, Warren co-founded Hedgy, one of the first DeFi platforms for institutional OTC bitcoin transactions using programmable, escrowed smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. Warren got started in the crypto industry as a hobbyist Bitcoin miner in 2011, back when one could still mine a block with a CPU. Warren earned two bachelor’s degrees from Northwestern and did graduate studies at Harvard. Warren is a regular presence in the blockchain community and press, a frequent public speaker, and has also guest lectured at institutions such as Stanford, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Wharton, University College London, and University of Zurich on topics related to blockchain, cryptocurrency, fintech, and technology more broadly.

Dr. Weikeng (pronounced "waken") Chen has also joined Discreet Labs as Chief Scientist where he will be leading cryptography research and development. Weikeng recently completed his PhD at U.C. Berkeley’s world renowned Security & Applied Cryptography Group, where he focused his research on systems and applications of ZKPs and multi-party computation (MPC) with an emphasis on efficient implementations. Beyond his academic research, Weikeng has also been a core contributor to several ZKP open-source projects implemented in Rust including: arkworks, an ecosystem for developing and programming with zkSNARKs; Marlin, a Rust library that implements a preprocessing zkSNARK for R1CS with universal and updatable SRS; snarkVM, a virtual machine for ZKPs; and DZK, a decentralized system for practical end-to-end zero-knowledge proofs. Weikeng was also instrumental in implementing ZEXE (Zero-knowledge EXEcution), a ledger based system for enabling decentralized private computation. He was advised by Professor Raluca Ada Popa, a 2022 ACM Grace Hopper Murray Award winner.

Dr. Weikeng Chen has already made many voluntary contributions to the Findora open source project, especially Zei, a cryptographic library of advanced ZKPs. Weikeng is among a small group of cryptographers that have dedicated their academic careers to the technologies that Discreet Labs is building to scale web3 privacy.

In one year’s time, Discreet Labs has shipped multiple exciting protocols, platforms, and products for Findora, including an advanced multi-chain architecture, which combines privacy and scalability on Findora OG (UTXO chain) with programmability and interoperability on Findora X (scalable Web3 privacy solution with full EVM compatibility). Discreet Labs also recently launched Prism, a trustless atomic swap protocol that bridges Findora OG and Findora X. To interoperate Findora’s multi-chain architecture with the growing ecosystem, Discreet Labs launched Rialto, which is a non-custodial bridge between all EVM compatible chains and Findora.

With the launch of toolkits like Prism and Rialto, as well as a cryptographic library of advanced ZKPs, Discreet Labs is now focused on extending Findora privacy to EVM-based dApps with smart contract functionalities. Most recently, on April 22nd, Discreet Labs, in partnership with Columbus DAO, launched Yellow Submarine, the first Web3 dApp to enable privacy on Ethereum-compatible projects. In a historic, industry first, Yellow Submarine uses a practical implementation of ZKP to allow private transactions across BNB Chain, Ethereum and other EVM compatible chains, in a simple, intuitive and user-friendly way.

We are proud to welcome Warren as CEO and Weikeng as Chief Scientist of Discreet Labs and look forward to the future innovation they will drive forward for Findora and more.

Media contact:

ABS media(at)findora(dot)org Jonathan(at)melrosepr(dot)com

About Discreet Labs

Discreet Labs is building scalable privacy systems for web3. Discreet Labs believes our digital future is more private and self-sovereign and is building the technology necessary to achieve this vision. Discreet Labs combines the reliability and transparency of decentralized, public blockchains, together with the security and privacy of zero-knowledge proofs, to enable confidential transactions. Applications developed by Discreet Labs provide both the transactional privacy that institutions desire, along with the proofs of compliance that regulators require.

About Findora Findora is the first and leading privacy scaling solution for the entire crypto ecosystem, including Ethereum and all EVM compatible chains. As a privacy-centric ecosystem and layer-1 blockchain incorporating advanced ZKP-based cryptography features, Findora enables fully confidential on-chain and cross-chain transfers. Findora's private transfers between different blockchains create the foundation for institutional finance to enter DeFi in a significant way, ushering in the next wave of crypto mass adoption. Founded by a team of leading academics and entrepreneurs, including John Powers, former CEO of Stanford’s USD $25 billion endowment fund, Findora is accessible to anyone in the world, whether individuals, small and medium enterprises, or industry giants. For more information, visit www.findora.org.

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Source: Company press release.