applied-cryptography
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Vivek Nair
Vivek Nair is the co-founder and CEO of Multifactor (YC F25), an applied cryptography company building zero-trust authentication, authorization, and auditing for AI agents. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley at 22 as a Hertz Fellow, published landmark work on privacy in virtual reality, and served as a technical lead in cyber units at the Department of Defense and CIA before starting the company.
Cubist
Cubist is a security-first Web3 infrastructure company that builds hardware-backed key management and confidential compute for digital assets. Its flagship platform, CubeSigner, keeps cryptographic keys sealed inside secure hardware (HSMs and AWS Nitro Enclaves) while giving developers low-latency signing through revocable sessions and a programmable policy engine - resolving the old tradeoff between cold-wallet security and hot-wallet speed. Founded by applied cryptographers and security researchers from Carnegie Mellon and UC San Diego who designed primitives underlying Ethereum and Avalanche, Cubist serves staking providers, DeFi protocols, bridges, and institutions building on internet capital markets.
Riad Wahby
Riad Wahby is the co-founder and CEO of Cubist, a key management infrastructure company building hardware-backed, policy-driven signing for Web3. He is also an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an applied cryptographer known for co-inventing the proof systems Lasso, Hyrax, and Brakedown and co-authoring the BLS signature standard (RFC 9380) used across Ethereum, Avalanche, and other chains. Before academia and entrepreneurship he spent a decade designing analog and mixed-signal chips at Silicon Labs and researched cryptography at Algorand.
Trevor Perrin
Trevor Perrin is an applied cryptographer who co-created the Signal Protocol with Moxie Marlinspike - the encryption backbone now protecting conversations for over a billion people across Signal, WhatsApp, and beyond. He also designed the Noise Protocol Framework, a foundational cryptographic framework deployed in WireGuard, WhatsApp's client-server layer, and the Lightning Network. A 2017 Levchin Prize winner, Perrin works as an independent consultant on quantum readiness and cryptographic systems design.