Marek Olszewski
Co-Founder at Self
Berlin, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMarek Olszewski is a seasoned founder and technology leader with over a decade building products at the intersection of distributed systems, cryptography, and mobile-first financial services. As co-founder and CEO of cLabs and president of Valora, he drives engineering efforts to bring payment-ready Ethereum L2 and a global Venmo-like wallet to mobile users. He previously founded Locu (acquired by GoDaddy) and served as VP of Engineering at GoDaddy, combining startup grit with enterprise-scale execution. His research background—MIT PhD ABD and a 2011 Facebook Fellowship for work on deterministic multithreading and transactional memory—underpins hands-on contributions to the Celo blockchain, including miner/VM changes for phone verification workflows. An active angel investor and advisor to 30+ startups, he now also pioneers privacy-preserving identity with Self Protocol and zkPassport. Based in Berlin, Marek blends deep systems research, pragmatic engineering, and product-focused crypto work to advance financial inclusion.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
PhD ABD Computer Science, PhD ABD Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMASc Computer Engineering, MASc Computer Engineering at University of Toronto
English, Polish, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (9)
go10
api10
web3js10
apidoc10
elo10
blockchain10
cryptography9
json8
http7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
celo-org/celo-blockchain
Dec 2017 - Jul 2019
Official repository for the golang Celo Blockchain
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 11 commits, 1 comment in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Marek primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the Celo blockchain project. Their work involved modifying the miner and core VM logic to implement features related to SMS verification, including signing phone numbers and integrating with a mining pool for sending verification texts. The user also updated the project to use a new mining pool API and lowered the peer connection backoff time for faster block times. Furthermore, there were code changes concerning phone number hashing to scrypt and temporarily disabling the phone hash commitments.
golangcelo-blockchainethereumblockchainweb3
marekolszewski/crypto-ecosystems
Dec 2020 - Jul 2024
A taxonomy for open source cryptocurrency, blockchain, and decentralized ecosystems
Contributions:20 pushes in 3 years 7 months
pythonblockchaindecentralizedcryptocurrencyecosystems
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