Jules De Smit
Protocol Lead at Lombard
Berlin, Germany
Summary
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RockstarJules De Smit is a Protocol Lead and applied cryptographer based in Berlin with eight years of hands-on experience building zero-knowledge proof systems and blockchain protocols. He has held senior roles at Matter Labs, Aleo, Scroll and Dusk, and currently leads protocol work at Lombard, blending deep theoretical knowledge with production-grade engineering. Jules has contributed significant backend work to prominent open-source ZK projects like snarkOS and snarkVM—optimizing consensus and sidechain difficulty mechanisms, and enabling WASM compilation and robust serialization for Marlin circuits. Comfortable across consensus, circuit verification and performance-critical infrastructure, he is equally at home implementing protocol primitives and tuning them for real-world deployment. Colleagues describe him as someone who pairs pure-math instincts with pragmatic engineering, often surfacing optimizations that improve both correctness and throughput.
8 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
English, Dutch
Github Skills (14)
zk10
zkp10
consensus10
rust10
cryptography10
blockchain10
serialization9
serializer9
performance-optimization9
distributed-systems9
blazor-webassembly9
webassembly9
serializable9
deserialization9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
ProvableHQ/snarkVM
Oct 2021 - Oct 2022
A zkVM for Decentralized Private Computations (DPC)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:31 reviews, 294 commits, 25 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Jules focused on enabling WASM compilation and enhancing serialization/deserialization for the Marlin circuit. They made code changes across multiple files related to circuit verification keys, proofs, and circuit information, primarily modifying the `marlin/src` directory. Their work also included implementing parameter download logic for WASM, using `reqwest` and associated thread spawning and memory management adjustments. These changes appear to be aimed at supporting WASM compilation for the zkVM.
cryptographyzkpzeroknowledgerust
ProvableHQ/snarkOS
Jul 2021 - Feb 2022
A Decentralized Operating System for ZK Applications
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:23 reviews, 94 commits, 9 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Jules primarily contributed to the backend infrastructure of the snarkOS project, with a focus on implementing and optimizing the consensus mechanism. Their work included implementing a difficulty-based tiebreaker for sidechains, fixing tests, and increasing the performance of difficulty checks. The user also added a block template generation function and worked on mining pool integration.
cryptographyrustoperating-systemblockchainzero-knowledge
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