Juan Benet
Founder, CEO, Engineer at Protocol Labs
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJuan Benet is a founder-engineer with 16 years of experience building decentralized networking stacks and distributed systems from Palo Alto. As CEO and technical lead of Protocol Labs he launched foundational projects like IPFS and Filecoin, and remains an active contributor across core open-source repos (js-ipfs, go-libp2p, Kubo) where his work spans low-level networking, DHTs, crypto refactors, and production DevOps. He combines systems-level rigor in Go and JavaScript with frontend fluency (authored the IPFS Web UI) and infrastructure automation for reproducible builds and containerized workflows. Comfortable moving between specification, implementation, and operations, he has a track record of turning research-grade protocols into widely used developer tooling and networks. Unusually, his background mixes deep academic training at Stanford with hands-on biology lab research and early mobile-game product experience, reflecting a curiosity that fuels interdisciplinary engineering.
16 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
M.S. Computer Science, M.S. Computer Science at Stanford University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (53)
javascript10
http-streaming10
electron10
scripting10
testing10
css10
distributed-systems10
ipfs10
networking10
data-structure10
libp2p10
media-playback10
script10
go10
emacs10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
filecoin-project/specs
Jun 2019 - Dec 2019
The Filecoin protocol specification
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:334 commits, 65 PRs, 189 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Juan primarily worked on setting up the build and deployment infrastructure and implementing the core specification. The user developed scripts for installing dependencies, managing emacs configuration, and publishing documentation to GitHub pages and IPFS. Furthermore, the user worked on a VM implementation and core files used for the specifications.
filecoinfilecoin-specificationspecificationblockchainspec
libp2p/go-libp2p-kad-dht
Jul 2014 - Jul 2019
A Kademlia DHT implementation on go-libp2p
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:170 commits, 1 push, 1 branch in 5 years
Contributions summary:Juan primarily contributed to the implementation of a Kademlia DHT (Distributed Hash Table) within the go-libp2p framework. Their commits focused on defining and implementing core interfaces for the DHT, including PutValue, GetValue, Provide, and FindPeer functionalities. They also made modifications to the routing table structure and incorporated essential utility functions such as Xor calculations. Furthermore, they integrated changes to accommodate new network capabilities.
golangipfskademlia-dhtdhtgo-libp2p
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