Ariel Gabizon joins Cardinal Cryptography in an advisory capacity to help the Aleph Zero team design an optimal privacy solution for the broader blockchain market.
Aleph Zero’s Liminal technology, developed by Cardinal Cryptography and Nethermind, just got stronger: Ariel Gabizon will advise the team on the theoretical design of this particular framework.
Former cryptographic engineer at Zcash, a researcher at Protocol Labs, and Chief Scientist of the Aztec Protocol has been kind enough to help take Liminal to the next level as far as its sophistication, efficiency, and practicality are concerned.
Ariel is one of the authors of PLONK, one of the most popular SNARK proof systems. More recently, he’s been focused on optimizing ZK-SNARKs for specific cryptographic-heavy operations. He is also known for discovering and helping to mitigate an unlimited counterfeiting bug in Zcash (covered by Fortune Magazine).
Ariel received his Mathematics and Computer Science Bachelor’s Degree at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary research institutions based in Rehovot, Israel. He was also a Postdoctoral Researcher at several universities, including Columbia, UT Austin and Technion in Israel. Since 2016, he’s been heavily involved with blockchain privacy technology, starting as a Cryptographic Engineer at Zcash. Afterward, he moved to Protocol Labs and, ultimately, to Aztec Protocol, where he served as Chief Scientist for three years.
Ariel also runs his company, Zeta Function Technologies, with headquarters in Krakow, Poland.
Liminal is a product within the Aleph Zero ecosystem, offering innovative security measures based on a combination of zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARKs) and secure multiparty computation (sMPC). These two solutions will complement each other by eliminating their respective problems; while ZK-SNARKs will allow for basic transfers, they’re incapable of dealing with multi-user interactions and, therefore, a global private state. sMPCs, on the other hand, can be used to implement these concepts.
A premier example of such an application would be a decentralized exchange based on an automated market-maker and an order book model without revealing the value of either orders or individual transactions—such as Common.