Henry De Valence is a founder and systems-oriented software engineer with 13 years of experience building privacy-preserving crypto systems and high-performance Rust infrastructure from San Francisco. He leads Penumbra Labs and actively develops Penumbra, a private proof-of-stake network and DEX, while contributing low-level work to prominent Rust projects like stdarch (AVX/IFMA intrinsics), x25519-dalek, and Zcash's Zebra. Comfortable across cryptography, consensus, and runtime feature-detection, he pairs deep systems programming with pragmatic API and protobuf design for real-world distributed systems. Notably, his contributions span both core cryptographic primitives (Bulletproofs, X25519) and architecture-level optimizations, reflecting a blend of research-grade correctness and production reliability.
A pure-Rust implementation of Bulletproofs using Ristretto.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:2 reviews, 541 commits, 148 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Henry primarily contributed to the implementation of the core cryptographic functionalities in the project, particularly focusing on bulletproofs using Ristretto. Their work involved the replacement of arrays with bytestrings for test vectors and code formatting. These changes indicate a focus on improving the code's robustness and maintainability.
Penumbra is a fully private proof-of-stake network and decentralized exchange for the Cosmos ecosystem.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:5 releases, 1561 reviews, 776 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Henry primarily worked on implementing and improving core back-end functionalities within the Penumbra decentralized exchange project, as evidenced by their commits involving the creation of the initial Rust crate, the stub implementation of the ABCI server, and the addition of the `FullViewingKey` structures. They also contributed to the definition of the data structures of the "core" elements by adding and extending protobuf definitions. The user demonstrated proficiency in Rust and a familiarity with gRPC and state management.
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