In case you missed it: I recently joined @0xMiden as Engineering Manager 🥳 After interviewing with many leading companies in the space (and to those - thank you for the trust), I saw the best fit with Miden on multiple fronts: the vision, the team & the tech. ↩️

1. The vision: institutional adoption will be the biggest unlock for crypto, and the few winners will absolutely trump the currently "successful" web3 projects in terms of impact, reach, and returns. But institutional adoption will never happen without a privacy-first blockchain. I had long been an advocate of this view, including in my previous startup. ↩️

2. The team: I could talk at length about @bobbinth's visionary approach and his tech versatility, but his ability to assemble the top team is truly outstanding. Absolutely everyone on the team is putting their heart into the project. In all my years working professionally, never have I seen a team of engineers so motivated, dedicated, and hardworking as I see at Miden. Not to mention everyone being an A-player, often leaving me with the impostor syndrome, but ever more driven. It's a great pleasure and a learning experience working alongside my new Miden colleagues.

3. The tech: ZK & protocol design ZK: while my journey with ZK started with elliptic curve cryptography, over the years I had grown to appreciate the benefits that hash-based proof systems are simpler and more efficient. Miden is already using STARKs and will soon be migrating to the state-of-the-art Plonky3. Protocol design: While interviewing for Miden, I had built an orderbook PoC and immediately fell in love with the concept of an Edge blockchain. It's a different programming paradigm where not only we move away from RE-execution (also on Ethereum's new roadmap), but also we remove the burden of EXECUTION from the validators. Instead, users make state transitions locally and prove them. And that is possible today already, thanks to very efficient STARKs^.

LFG @0xMiden!