Daira Hopwood
Software Engineer at Jacaranda Software
Stevenage, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaira Hopwood is a software engineer with 12 years of experience who applies mathematical rigor from an Oxford degree in Mathematics and Computer Science to applied cryptography and blockchain engineering. Known on GitHub as an R&D Engineering Manager at Electric Coin Company, she is an active contributor to Zcash projects including the Zcash Improvement Proposals, the Halo2 zero-knowledge proving system, and librustzcash. Her contributions span protocol-specification work for shielded payments, implementing and optimizing core cryptographic primitives (e.g., Tonelli-Shanks, sqrt_ratio), and practical Rust engineering such as SHA-256d transaction hashing and ZIP 339 support. Based in Stevenage, UK, she bridges specification-level design with hands-on backend implementation, improving both mathematical foundations and production blockchain code.
13 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Oxford
English, German, French
Stackoverflow
2,321reputation
1.4mreached
13answers
0questions
encoding
top-5%
windows
top-5%
cmd
top-5%
unicode
top-5%
python
top-5%
merge
top-5%
Github Skills (26)
zcash10
proofs10
proof10
merkle-tree10
cryptography10
blockchain10
rust10
transactional9
transaction9
python9
windows9
encoding9
unicode9
merge9
cmd9
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
zcash/zips
Dec 2015 - Dec 2022
Zcash Improvement Proposals
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1132 reviews, 2324 commits, 356 PRs in 7 years
Contributions summary:Daira appears to be contributing to the Zcash project by modifying core protocol specifications and making updates related to transaction formats. They are directly involved in the implementation details of the shielded payment protocol, adding and changing elements for the transaction format and validating criteria, as well as refactoring the existing code base. These updates are primarily geared towards maintaining the integrity of the blockchain.
cryptographyzcashethereumproposalsblockchain
zcash/halo2
Nov 2020 - Jan 2023
The Halo2 zero-knowledge proving system
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Cryptography Engineer
Back-end Developer & Cryptography EngineerContributions:686 reviews, 194 commits, 69 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Daira primarily contributed to the core cryptography and mathematical foundations of the Halo2 zero-knowledge proving system. Their work includes implementing and optimizing square root algorithms using the Tonelli-Shanks and table-based methods within the codebase. The user also introduced essential functionalities such as the `sqrt_alt` function, alongside refining existing functionalities and addressing code review comments for efficiency and correctness. Furthermore, they implemented the `sqrt_ratio` implementation, expanding the library's capabilities.
cryptocurrencycryptographyzcashzero-knowledge
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.