Kevin (Mai-Hsuan) Chia

Software Engineer · Taipei, Taiwan

Software engineer focused on blockchain, applied cryptography, and systems & networking. 8+ years of experience, including 6 years in total at the Ethereum Foundation (Ethereum 2.0 P2P networking, then ZK / MPC), plus XY Finance (correctness-critical backend and transaction systems handling real customer funds) and Lawskey (leading engineering as CTO).

Experience

  1. Apr – Jun 2026
    Apr – Jun 2026

    SALSAA (baby-lattice-folding) Open source

    Implementer

    Open-source Rust implementation of SALSAA, a post-quantum, lattice-based folding scheme for zero-knowledge proof systems.

    • Came out of a paper-study group led by a researcher; wrote the entire implementation end to end in Rust with no external cryptography dependencies: field and cyclotomic ring arithmetic, negacyclic NTT, Ajtai commitments, multivariate sum-check, and the full chain of reductions of knowledge.
    • Open source with CI and tests; presented at COSCUP 2026.
    • Rust
    • Lattice cryptography
    • Sum-check
    • NTT
  2. Apr 2025 – Mar 2026
    Apr 2025 – Mar 2026

    Lawskey

    Co-founder & CTO · Taipei

    An AI legal-tech startup: contract review for individuals and contract-lifecycle management for businesses.

    • Led engineering and launched a B2C AI contract-review product and a B2B contract-lifecycle-management platform; onboarded the first small-business customer and recurring professional users (lawyers, accountants).
    • Designed the backend, data model, and asynchronous LLM review workflow with organization-scoped access control; ran it in production with CI/CD, alerting, rate limiting, and prompt-injection safeguards.
    • Built an LLM evaluation pipeline: LLM-as-judge scoring against a lawyer-co-authored rubric to catch prompt regressions.
    • FastAPI
    • PostgreSQL
    • GCP Cloud Run
    • LLM
  3. Feb 2023 – Mar 2025
    Feb 2023 – Mar 2025

    Ethereum Foundation · Privacy & Scaling Explorations

    Software Engineer · Remote

    PSE is the Ethereum Foundation team building applied zero-knowledge and multi-party computation tooling.

    • TLSNotary: Ported the Rust TLSNotary prover (MPC-TLS / zkTLS: generates a cryptographic proof that data came from a real website; TLSNotary is the original zkTLS protocol) to the browser via WebAssembly, resolving dependencies lacking wasm32 support and integrating a WebSocket-to-TCP proxy so the browser could open TLS sessions; this enabled the TLSNotary Chrome extension published on the Chrome Web Store, shipped with a teammate.
    • MPCStats: Led a 3-person team building it: TLSNotary verifies where exchange-balance inputs came from, and MP-SPDZ computes aggregate statistics without revealing individual balances; demoed live at Devcon 2024.
    • rlnjs: Rebuilt rlnjs, the TypeScript SDK for RLN (a rate-limiting protocol for anonymous P2P networks), with a modular, more intuitive API; integrated its ZK circuits and smart contracts, supported both Node.js and browser, and added a test suite. Published on npm.
    • Rust / WASM
    • TypeScript
    • Python / FastAPI
    • MP-SPDZ
    • ZK
  4. Sep 2021 – Jan 2023
    Sep 2021 – Jan 2023

    XY Finance

    Blockchain Architect · Taipei

    A cross-chain bridge and swap aggregator moving user funds across 15+ blockchain networks.

    • Core engineer on a production cross-chain bridge spanning 15+ blockchain networks with ~$3M average TVL (user funds held by the system): built and maintained the swap engine, backend services, and internal Python libraries; co-designed and implemented the Solidity smart contracts (EVM) for asset custody and cross-chain swap execution.
    • Designed and built a PostgreSQL-backed transaction manager that atomically coordinated nonce allocation and submitted-transaction state using row-level locking, with rollback, state re-validation, and retry handling for transient failures.
    • Handled contract testing, release rehearsals on a mainnet fork, release execution, external security-audit coordination, and logging and alerting (Cloud Logging, Slack); was on the shared weekend on-call rotation.
    • Python
    • FastAPI
    • PostgreSQL
    • Solidity / EVM
    • GCP
    • Docker
  5. Mar 2020 – Sep 2021
    Mar 2020 – Sep 2021

    Ethereum Foundation · ZKP-Applied

    Software Engineer · Remote

    Ethereum Foundation team building privacy applications on zero-knowledge proofs.

    • PeekABook: Built PeekABook, a private order-matching system on a self-implemented SMP protocol (two-party secure computation) built from the specification, running peer-to-peer over WebRTC with smart contracts.
    • BlindFind: Built BlindFind, a privacy-preserving peer-discovery network on the same SMP protocol, combined with zero-knowledge circuits (circom / Groth16).
    • TypeScript
    • circom / Groth16
    • Secure two-party computation
    • WebRTC
  6. Nov 2017 – Feb 2020
    Nov 2017 – Feb 2020

    Ethereum Foundation · Research

    Software Engineer · Remote

    Ethereum 2.0 research: sharding and the peer-to-peer networking layer.

    • Sharding PoC: Worked on the initial Ethereum sharding proof of concept and sharding-p2p-poc, an early prototype integrating libp2p into Ethereum 2.0.
    • py-libp2p: Primary maintainer of py-libp2p (now 600+ GitHub stars), the Python P2P stack for the Eth2 client Trinity: re-architected TCP transport, secure-channel negotiation, stream multiplexing, and GossipSub into a tested, spec-aligned stack, and led the asyncio → Trio migration.
      • p2pclient: Led the first py-libp2p ↔ go-libp2p interoperability effort, building p2pclient to drive the Go daemon over Protobuf, with CI interop tests.
      • py-multiaddr: Maintainer of py-multiaddr, the Python multiaddr library used by libp2p: reviewed and merged community contributions and published releases 0.0.8 and 0.0.9.
    • Python
    • Go
    • libp2p
    • asyncio / Trio

Talks

2026

2025

2024

2023

2020

2018

Skills & Education

Skills

Languages

  • Python
  • TypeScript / Node.js
  • Rust
  • Solidity
  • Go
  • C/C++

Cryptography

  • ZK (Groth16, sum-check, lattice-based folding schemes)
  • MPC
  • circom
  • snarkjs
  • MP-SPDZ
  • TLSNotary (MPC-TLS)

Blockchain

  • Solidity / EVM
  • Hardhat
  • Brownie
  • web3.py
  • Cross-chain bridges
  • Secureum bootcamp (Certora, Sherlock tracks)

Backend & Systems

  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLAlchemy
  • async Python (asyncio / Trio)
  • GCP Cloud Run
  • GitHub Actions CI/CD
  • Docker

Networking

  • P2P networking (libp2p)
  • GossipSub
  • WebRTC
  • WebSockets

Education