Alex Stokes
R&D at ephemeral labs
Earth, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Stokes is an R&D engineer with 12 years of experience building decentralized systems, cryptographic tooling, and embedded/ML-backed products. Currently at Ephemeral Labs, he applies cryptographic research to production-grade Ethereum tooling and has substantial open-source contributions to major projects like paradigmxyz/reth, lighthouse, py-evm and Trinity. He brings full-stack instincts from founding Piper (hardware+software for education) and early-stage engineering at Go, pairing systems-level Rust and Go work with Python and Solidity expertise. His contributions often target core protocol logic—payload builders, consensus tests, and bitfield/serialization fixes—reflecting a focus on correctness, security, and performance. Based in Texas but thinking globally, he’s fascinated by computing as a new medium and by what computation looks like when it’s ubiquitous rather than centralized.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Chemistry, Computational science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Chemistry, Computational science at Princeton University
Spanish, rust, clojure, c, javascript, python, go
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (40)
dependency-management10
ss10
javascript10
test-driven-design10
vyper10
serializer10
pytest10
bit-manipulation10
python10
redis10
testing10
evm10
distributed-systems10
black-formatter10
digital-signature10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
ethereum/trinity
Sep 2019 - Aug 2020
The Trinity client for the Ethereum network
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:286 commits, 289 PRs, 174 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Alex made updates related to the fork choice specification in the Trinity client for the Ethereum network. Their work involved implementing new scoring mechanisms using LMD GHOST and refining the handling of blocks and attestations within the fork choice logic. They introduced new data structures and functions, with changes across multiple files within the project's code base. The contributions also include modifications to test files, ensuring that the changes are properly validated.
ethereum
libp2p/py-libp2p
May 2019 - Mar 2020
The Python implementation of the libp2p networking stack 🐍 [under development]
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 234 commits, 101 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on improving the build process and dependencies of the Python libp2p library. They updated and pinned package versions, specifically for `multiaddr` and added `black` as a lint dependency, which improved code formatting. They also removed the `pylint` package, and introduced a command-line option to the chat example to toggle between a local IP and a public one, further demonstrating their contributions towards improving the library's infrastructure.
libp2pnetworkingpython
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