Dankrad Feist
Researcher at Ethereum Foundation
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDankrad Feist is a researcher and software engineer with a PhD in theoretical physics who blends deep mathematical rigor with a decade of hands-on engineering across crypto research, startups, and enterprise deployments. He has been central to Ethereum’s consensus and sharding work—contributing tests, specifications, and performance-minded tooling to the widely used ethereum/consensus-specs and ethereum/research repositories. As a co‑founder of HiDoc he applies data, ML, and backend architecture to improve chronic digestive health, and he’s also advised product teams at Knit while guiding research at the Ethereum Foundation and Tempo. His background includes building analytical foundations at Palantir and low-level systems work (FPGA/PCB) at Argon Design, reflecting a comfort from hardware to distributed systems. Known for turning complex theory into reliable, testable implementations, he prioritizes shipping what truly matters to users and businesses. A quieter differentiator: he routinely optimizes developer ergonomics and caching strategies in production crypto tooling, not just core protocol code.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Theoretical Physics and Applied Mathematics, PhD Theoretical Physics and Applied Mathematics at University of CambridgeTechnischen Universität DarmstadtPhysics Mathematics, Physics Mathematics at EPFL
English, German, French, Chinese
Github Skills (10)
consensus10
python10
ethereum10
blockchain10
test-automation10
testing10
algorithms9
data-structure9
data-structures9
json7
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
ethereum/research
Mar 2019 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 80 commits, 15 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Dankrad's contributions primarily focused on implementing and debugging code related to the Ethereum research project. Their work involved refining data structures and algorithms within the `spec_pythonizer/minimal_ssz.py` file, including tuple length assertions, is_basic() implementation, and merkleization logic. The user also added JSON serialization and deserialization capabilities to enhance debugging, and created a monkey patch to optimize validator shuffling caching. These changes suggest a focus on improving the project's core functionality and performance.
ethereum/consensus-specs
Mar 2019 - Dec 2022
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Consensus Specifications
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:144 reviews, 218 commits, 47 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Dankrad primarily contributed to the testing and specification of the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake consensus. Their work involved implementing and testing core phase 1 functionality, including custody slashing, and early derived secret reveals. They also modified test helpers and corrected syntax errors in phase 1 specifications, demonstrating a focus on maintaining and improving the codebase's reliability and correctness.
consensusstakeethereumproof-of-stakesolidity
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.