Meet the team

We're building the Celestia network

Team
Advisors

Our team has deep experience building and scaling blockchains from projects like Ethereum, Cosmos and Harmony.

We are on a mission to change the way that blockchains and decentralized applications are built—making them more secure, scalable and sovereign. We envision a world where global communities have the power to self-organize without being burdened by existing power structures.

Mustafa Al-Bassam

CEO, Celestia Labs

PhD in blockchain scaling at UCL, Co-founder of Chainspace (acquired by Facebook)

Ismail Khoffi

CTO, Celestia Labs

Former senior engineer at Tendermint and Interchain Foundation

John Adler

CRO, Celestia Labs

Creator of Optimistic Rollups, previously scalability researcher at ConsenSys

Nick White

COO, Celestia Labs

Co-founder of Harmony, BS & MS from Stanford

Tomasz Zdybał

Software Engineer

Former core developer at Ethereum Classic, trust minimization maximalist

Hlib Kanunnikov

Software Engineer

Previously lead developer at ProximaX, networking enthusiast

Evan Forbes

Software Engineer

Former data engineer, rollup maximalist

Rene Lubov

Software Engineer

Former engineer at Go Ethereum with a background in distributed systems testing

Nhu Viet Nguyen

Software Engineer

Former testing engineer at Oracle

Rachid Chami

Software Engineer

Bitcoin believer, security enthusiast, former blockchain developer at Web3 Labs

Viacheslav Gonkivskyi

Software Engineer

Former software engineer at Luxoft

Manav Aggarwal

Software Engineer

Former contributor at Nebula Protocol and Two Sigma Investments, BS & MS from Stanford

Yaz Khoury

Head of Developer Relations

Former DevRel engineer at Celo Foundation and former Director of DevRel at Ethereum Classic

Ekram Ahmed

Head of Marketing and Communications

Former positioning and strategy consultant for Facebook and Google

Tejinder Nijjer

Operations Associate

Former project manager at Xerox and Elekta

Jeremy Sklaroff

Head of Operations and General Counsel

Former general counsel of Edge & Node/The Graph and financial regulatory attorney at Davis Polk

Rootul Patel

Software Engineer

Former software engineer at Palantir and AWS

Ryan Ford

Software Engineer

Former smart contract engineer

Vlad Krinitsin

Software Engineer

Former software engineer at Vivid Money

Gabriel Blaut

Software Engineer

Hackathon Enjoyer

Rahul Ghangas

Software Engineer

Former backend engineer at Ren

Mojtaba Eskandari

Software Engineer

Former software engineer at Tendermint

Matt Sevey

Director of Engineering

Former core developer of Sia and Skynet, Outdoor Enthusiast and Career Coach

Josh Stein

Solutions Engineer

Former DevRel at Ankr & Teaching Assistant at buildspace

Alina Loseva

Visual Artist

Explorer of the world

Mary Liu

Business Development Manager

Former Galaxy Digital FoF investor, Schwarzman Scholar, BA from Columbia

Ganesha Upadhyaya

Senior Research Engineer

Former lead engineer at Harmony Protocol, MS & PhD in Compilers

Connor O Hara

Software Engineer

Cryptography and distributed systems enthusiast

Callum Waters

Software Engineer

Former lead engineer of the Tendermint consensus protocol. Chief instigator of deadlocks, race conditions and memory leaks.

Joseph Al-Chami

Product Manager

Former Product Manager at Figment

Eugenia Acosta

Product Manager

Former product marketing manager at Snap Inc. and Fit Analytics

Amy Yu

Operations Manager

Previously in the realm of esports. Now exploring the web3 frontier

Natalie Kubalova

DevRel Program Manager

Former Head of Relationships at DAO Maker, Namaste in Crypto

Diego Ferrer

Solutions Engineer

Former Smart Contract Engineer at Tessera, Celestia Modular Fellow

Javed Khan

Software Engineer

Former software engineer at Optimism, Handshake and Decred. Found DoS vulnerabilities in multiple cryptocurrencies: invdos.net

Sanaz Taheri

Senior Protocol Engineer

Ph.D. in computer science & engineering, specialized in cryptography, applied-cryptography and distributed systems and applications. Former protocol engineer at Status.im.