Speakers
Current Science & Grand Challenges August 16-17, 2025 @ Internet Archive, SF
Confirmed so far ..
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Ying Tong Lai
Ying Tong is an applied cryptographer working on privacy for coordination and purpose limitation. She is interested in real-world applications and better methods for threat modelling and inclusive design. She has worked on financial privacy, privacy-preserving digital identity, and protocols for zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation. She is also a contributor to the ZKProof Standards effort to standardise generic zk-SNARKs.
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Michael Toomim
Computer Scientist. I work on Interoperable State Synchronization in Braid.org.
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Greg Slepak
Greg Slepak is a software engineer interested in protecting people's information. He got his start securing data at rest with an app called Espionage — user-friendly folder encryption and plausible deniability for Mac users. He moved on to securing data in motion, creating DNSChain and defining DPKI (decentralized public key infrastructure), a vision to fix the inherent security flaws in HTTPS. His latest work is Shelter Protocol, a way to build any web app that is end-to-end encrypted, decentralized, and user-friendly.
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Eric Harris-Braun
Eric Harris-Braun co-founded Holochain, Holo & the MetaCurrency project, each of which focus on a different layer of technical infrastructure for embodying a new economy. Holochain delivers a massively scalable framework for truly distributed web applications, which Holo uses to provide HoloFuel a value-stable currency backed by the productive capacity of web hosting, while the MetaCurrency project delves deep into the post-monetary currency designs to foster a more thrivable world.
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David "dave" Thompson
David Thompson is the CTO of the Spritely Institute, a US based nonprofit and research institution that is developing new technologies for the decentralized web. David leads Spritely's engineering team and contributes to the development of the Goblins distributed programming framework and the Hoot Scheme-to-WebAssembly compiler.
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Christian "cft" Tschudin
Diploma in Mathematics; PhD in Computer Science; PostDoc at ICSI, Berkeley; Assoc. prof. at Uppsala University, Sweden; Since 2002 full professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Research interests: distributed systems, computer neworks, mobile code, Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), metamorphic software ("how to securely use your computer post-compromise"). Radio amateur.
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Duke Dorje
I have a background in distributed systems, infrastructure (devops), cryptoeconomics, applied cryptography (PGP corp), and I'm pretty good at hacking together systems. I've done work at large companies, small startups, and radical semi-anonymous DAOs. I've been building IdentiKey for the past several years, a system of protocols and products that exists to address the roots of incumbency in our digital spaces through applying web3-style tech to identity and data ownership. I believe with the right tooling, a silent majority of people who have a subtle sense of 'wrongness' in using the corporate internet can come together and create affectively different kinds of spaces that don't have the twisted incentives that stem from the user extraction / attention economy / surveillance capitalism paradigm. I'm currently writing a post-quantum proxy recryption library for sharing data that's highly available but without a trusted cloud provider.
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Andreas "adz" Dzialocha
Working on p2panda (building blocks for p2p applications), Toolkitty (coordination app for collectives, organisers and venues) and Reflection (collaborative, local-first GTK text editor) with GNOME
