Pascal Berrang
Co-Founder & CTO at Nimiq
Saarland, Germany
Summary
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RockstarPascal Berrang is a cryptography-focused technology leader with a decade of engineering experience who now serves as Co-Founder & CTO of Zeroth Research and an Associate Professor driving a funded program on privacy-preserving AI safety verification. He combines academic rigor with product-minded engineering—applying zero-knowledge proofs and formal cryptographic techniques to make intelligent systems verifiable and safe. As an early contributor and current board member at Nimiq, he bridges blockchain research and real-world deployment, while his consulting work has delivered threat modelling, ISO 27001-aligned security programs, and privacy tooling like OpenRedact. On GitHub he has deep hands-on experience improving serialization, derive macros, and performance in foundational cryptographic crates such as arkworks-rs/algebra and snark, which underpin many ZK systems. Based in Saarland, Germany, he uniquely blends research leadership, open-source cryptographic engineering, and startup execution. Colleagues describe him as someone who turns formal math into practical, auditable security controls.
9 years of coding experience
German, English, Latin, French, Spanish
Github Skills (11)
deserialization10
proofs10
data-serialization10
proof10
rust10
rcs10
cryptography10
algebra10
serialization10
elliptic-curve9
macros9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
arkworks-rs/snark
Mar 2020 - Apr 2020
Interfaces for Relations and SNARKs for these relations
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 commits, 7 PRs, 62 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Pascal focused on improving the serialization and deserialization capabilities within the `arkworks-rs/snark` repository. They implemented and improved `CanonicalSerialize` and `CanonicalDeserialize` traits, including the addition of flags and derive macros. Furthermore, the user introduced optimizations to improve serialization size and performance. These changes are primarily related to the `algebra-core` module, which is foundational for the project's cryptographic operations.
cryptographyrelationssnarksr1csinterfaces
arkworks-rs/algebra
Mar 2020 - Apr 2020
Libraries for finite field, elliptic curve, and polynomial arithmetic
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Pascal focused on implementing improvements to the serialization and deserialization capabilities within the `algebra` crate, specifically targeting the `algebra-core` module. Their work involved refactoring existing code for performance gains and adding new features, such as support for serialization and deserialization of tuples and constant serialized sizes. These changes improved code readability, and the addition of derive macros streamlined the serialization/deserialization process for various data structures within the `algebra` crate.
cryptographyarithmeticrustfinite-fieldselliptic
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