Michael Straka
Cryptography Engineer at Gensyn
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Straka is a cryptography engineer with nine years of experience building secure, production-ready cryptographic systems for blockchain and fintech. He has contributed to high-profile projects like Aptos (implementing Ed25519 validation, ECDSA over NIST-P256, and Move-related tooling) and led cryptography work at Celo and cLabs, demonstrating both protocol-level expertise and smart-contract familiarity. Based in Austin and trained at Stanford (BS/MS in CS and Math), he combines rigorous academic foundations with hands-on Rust and backend development that improved cryptographic accumulator performance by 4–6x in research implementations. Notably, he bridges research and production: shipping crypto primitives and feature flags in layer-1 blockchain codebases while also simulating proof circuits for keyless designs.
9 years of coding experience
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Stanford University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (8)
aptos10
move10
rust10
cryptography10
blockchain10
smart-contracts9
ecdsa8
ed255197
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
aptos-labs/aptos-core
Mar 2023 - Nov 2024
Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain built to support the widespread use of blockchain through better technology and user experience.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:196 reviews, 23 PRs, 350 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on enhancing the Aptos blockchain's functionality by implementing and refining features related to cryptographic operations. Their work includes enabling a feature flag for Ed25519 public key validation, adding ECDSA signatures over NIST-P256 to the aptos-crypto crate, and creating a proof simulation for the keyless circuit. The contributions demonstrate an understanding of cryptography and the Aptos ecosystem. Furthermore, the user addressed the compilation of Drand Move examples, demonstrating familiarity with Move programming and smart contract development within the Aptos framework.
blockchainblockchain-networksmart-contractsaptos
celo-org/celo-validator-signer-app
Dec 2019 - Apr 2020
Contributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 8 pushes in 4 months
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