Daniele Di Benedetto

Lead Software Engineer Horizen Labs

I am an enthusiast Computer Engineer who values curiosity towards life and commitment to work among everything else.
I’m very passionate about novel technologies in the field of mathematics, cryptography and artificial intelligence, and I love working at projects and softwares in which those are exploited.
I’m constantly looking for hard challenges and I fully commit to them in order to learn as much as possible, thus improving my skills and satisfying my thirst for knowledge.

In Horizen Labs I’m leading the cryptographic engineering team, whose main responsibility is to design and implement the cryptographic backbone of Zendoo, a construction for Bitcoin-like blockchain systems that allows the creation and communication with sidechains of different types without knowing their internal structure;
this is achieved using recursive composition of zk-SNARKs to generate succinct proofs of sidechain state progression.

I mainly worked on zkSNARKs proving systems (Groth16, Marlin, Darlin, Halo), from the implementation of the low level algebraic operations to the high level cryptographic primitives and protocols, R1CS circuits (for the Zendoo Cross Chain Transfer Protocol) and integration with Blockchain, acquiring a good theoretical and practical expertise of the whole technological stack.

Currently researching and implementing zkSTARKs (Plonky2) and zkVMs.