Cem Özer
Co-Founder And CEO at Plaintext Capital
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCem Özer is a blockchain-focused engineer and founder with a decade of experience building p2p networking and distributed systems, currently serving as Co-Founder and CEO of Sovereign Labs in New York. He combines hands-on backend expertise in Java and Python with product leadership, having productionized the Teku Ethereum consensus client and helped launch the Beacon Chain. An active open-source contributor, his Teku commits improved core consensus and networking internals, and his test work on Celestia-node strengthened data availability robustness. As an advisor at Plaintext Capital and a former co-founder there, he bridges research, startups, and capital formation. Colleagues describe him as comfortable diving into low-level protocol details while steering strategic company growth.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Computer Science at Northwestern UniversityThe International Baccalaureate, The International Baccalaureate at VKV Koç High School
English, Turkish
Github Skills (9)
javas10
go10
ethereum10
blockchain10
data-availability10
java10
testing10
network-programming9
multithreading8
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
Consensys/teku
Dec 2018 - Feb 2021
Open-source Ethereum consensus client written in Java
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 312 reviews, 381 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Cem primarily contributed to the back-end development of the Ethereum consensus client. The commits demonstrate a focus on enhancing core functionalities such as implementing deep copy mechanisms for beacon state, refactoring existing functions, and adding new features like the management of attestation subnets within the networking layer. The contributions focused on improving internal architectural components within the project.
artemisconsensysethereumbeacon-chainblockchain
celestiaorg/celestia-node
Jan 2022 - Feb 2022
Celestia Data Availability Nodes
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 reviews, 1 PR, 10 comments in 25 days
Contributions summary:Cem primarily contributed to the testing infrastructure of the Celestia-node repository. They focused on adding and refining unit tests, specifically for the `ipld/read_test.go` file, which involved testing data retrieval functions. The user implemented tests to cover both positive and negative cases related to namespace ID lookups and ensured the robustness of the data availability node's data access logic. This work included writing tests that specifically focused on the retrieval of shares with a specific namespace ID and handling missing or out-of-range IDs.
availabilitynodesdata-availability-samplingcelestiadata-availability
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