Youssef Housni
Senior Applied Cryptographer at ConsenSys
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYoussef Housni is a Senior Applied Cryptographer based in New York with six years of hands-on experience building and optimizing zero-knowledge proof systems, elliptic-curve and pairing-based cryptography libraries in production (gnark and gnark-crypto) using Go and Rust. His work blends deep mathematics—PhD-level training in math and CS—with practical engineering: he has implemented pairing engines, finite-field optimizations, cyclotomic exponentiation tweaks and verifier parallelism that measurably improved performance. A regular open-source contributor to widely used projects like arkworks and gnark, he pairs careful testing and refactoring with occasional “naive ML” experiments that hint at a broader curiosity for applied algorithms. Formerly in cryptography R&D and embedded security at Secure-IC and EY, he also teaches blockchain topics, reflecting both practitioner and educator instincts.
6 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathématiques et informatique, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathématiques et informatique at École PolytechniqueMathématiques, Mathématiques at CPGE TangerDiplôme d'ingénieur, Electronics, MEng, Diplôme d'ingénieur, Electronics, MEng at ENSEIRB-MATMECA
French, Arabic, English, Spanish
Github Skills (25)
algorithm10
algorithms10
polynomials10
elliptic-curve10
proofs10
proof10
data-structure10
zksnark10
goroutine10
go10
f10
modular-arithmetic10
cryptography10
zk10
data-structures10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
Consensys/gnark-crypto
Oct 2020 - Jan 2023
gnark-crypto provides elliptic curve and pairing-based cryptography on BN, BLS12, BLS24 and BW6 curves. It also provides various algorithms (algebra, crypto) of particular interest to zero knowledge proof systems.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:86 reviews, 391 commits, 156 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Youssef primarily focused on making modifications to the core mathematical libraries. They updated mathematical formulas for improved performance and readability. Specifically, they were involved in optimizing exponentiation algorithms and refactoring existing code, as observed through the codebase changes.
hash-to-curvesnarkzkpparticularecdh
Consensys/gnark
Dec 2020 - Jan 2023
gnark is a fast zk-SNARK library that offers a high-level API to design circuits. The library is open source and developed under the Apache 2.0 license
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:153 reviews, 136 commits, 166 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Youssef's contributions primarily revolve around modifying and optimizing the verification process within the gnark zk-SNARK library. The code changes involve rearranging pairing operations using goroutines to improve the performance of the verifier. Additionally, the user fixed issues related to dependencies and updated the go.mod file to point to the correct repository branches. These changes suggest a focus on enhancing the efficiency and maintainability of the core cryptographic functionalities.
gnarkapir1cszkpsnark
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