Ismail Khoffi
Co-Founder And CTO at Celestia Labs
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIsmail Khoffi is a Co-Founder and CTO based in Berlin with 11 years of experience at the intersection of research and systems engineering, focused on distributed systems, cryptography, and blockchain infrastructure. He has led technical teams and shipped core protocol work across prominent open-source projects in the Tendermint/Cosmos/Celestia ecosystems, contributing security-sensitive improvements like constant-time signature comparison and JSON canonicalization for signing. His background spans applied research roles (EPFL, TU Berlin) and industry positions including Google and Informal Systems, where he built the first Tendermint light client in Rust. As a hands-on engineer he combines architecture-level thinking with meticulous low-level fixes (e.g., IPLD/blocksync rework, IAVL serialization and proof handling), and he routinely improves CI, dependency hygiene, and deployment automation. He also brings experience evaluating deep-tech grants for the European Commission, which complements his ability to translate research into production-grade systems.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Diplom (Masters equivalent) Mathematics and Computer Science, Diplom (Masters equivalent) Mathematics and Computer Science at The University of Bonn
English, German, Arabic
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (39)
crypto10
algorithm10
json10
cosmos-sdk10
algorithms10
kubernetes10
consensus10
docker10
tendermint10
bash10
comet10
dockers10
data-structure10
cicd10
gcp10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
celestiaorg/celestia-core
Apr 2020 - Jun 2022
A fork of CometBFT
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 736 reviews, 239 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ismail's commits primarily involve refactoring the codebase by replacing Tendermint imports with new organizational imports. This indicates a focus on core backend logic within the Celestia-core repository. The changes involve updating import paths and modifying code across multiple files, demonstrating a solid understanding of the project's architecture and dependencies. This suggests a role centered around maintaining and adapting the core functionalities of the forked CometBFT codebase.
ethereumblockchaincryptodata-availability-samplingcryptocurrency
informalsystems/tendermint-rs
Nov 2018 - Sep 2020
Client libraries for Tendermint/CometBFT in Rust!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 30 reviews, 101 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Ismail's contributions primarily involve modifying client libraries for Tendermint/CometBFT in Rust. They updated amino types related to votes, proposals, and heartbeats to align with the latest Tendermint and amino changes, including modifications to encoding schemes and field orders. Furthermore, they made adjustments to secret connection encoding and test vectors to ensure compatibility. The changes suggest a focus on the core protocol logic and data structures used in the Tendermint ecosystem.
ethereumrustblockchaintendermintcometbft
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