Virgil Griffith
Research Scientist at Ethereum
Maryland, Singapore
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolVirgil Griffith is a research scientist and avant-garde technologist with 12+ years building privacy-preserving networks, cryptocurrency systems, and data-science-driven research. He blends deep academic training (PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech) with hands-on product and security work—from founding onion.link and contributing backend improvements to Tor2web to shaping Ethereum’s smart-contract research. Virgil’s work sits at the intersection of blockchains, privacy, and machine intelligence, with a track record of published information-theory research and applied darkweb and cryptocurrency analysis. He has led academic groups and startups alike, winning practical hackathon awards while also shipping widely used privacy tooling. Notably, his background includes significant contributions to Tor ecosystem tooling and an unusual mix of public-facing notoriety and rigorous scientific output. Based in Singapore and Maryland, he prefers Python/R/Haskell and often frames engineering problems with insights from psychology and computational law.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Sciences, Computer and Cognitive Science, 3.7, Bachelor of Sciences, Computer and Cognitive Science, 3.7 at University of AlabamaCalifornia Institute of Technology
English, German
Github Skills (9)
http10
twisted10
python10
tor10
networking9
proxy9
configuration-management9
privacy8
security8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
tor2web/Tor2web
Dec 2014 - May 2016
Tor2web is an HTTP proxy software that enables access to Tor Hidden Services by mean of common web browsers
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:23 commits, 43 PRs, 69 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Virgil contributed to the back-end logic and configuration of the Tor2web project. They refactored and simplified code, including the use of list comprehensions. Their work involved adding and modifying configuration options, including those for rewriting links, and implementing functionality to handle extra HTTP response headers. They also addressed a bug related to URL rewriting and added support for the set-cookie header.
pythonproxyaaron-swartzanonimous-proxiesdigital-human-rights
ethresearch/zh-ethereum-wiki
Jul 2018 - Jul 2018
Contributions:40 commits, 25 pushes, 1 branch in 1 day
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