Hi! I am Danny Willems. I try to use my developer and mathematician skills to build softwares, libraries and companies to reach a better society according to my values. My values include, but are not restricted to, privacy, egalitarianism and more recently veganism. When possible, my work is released publicly in open-source and for free.
I spend most of my time trying to provide a better Internet for everyone. With this mission in mind, I co-founded LeakIX with Gregory Boddin and we aim to be the Internet red team.
I am also a cryptography engineer at O(1) Labs, a company catalyzing a new generation of applications powered by zero-knowledge cryptography.
Previously I was a cryptography engineer at Nomadic Labs in the cryptography team working on privacy preserving technologies. I was also the first engineer at B2C2.
During my study, I did an internship in the Gallium team at INRIA for my master thesis titled "To a typed language for modular programming" which consisted on unifying the core and modular language of OCaml.
I graduated with a master degree in Mathematics from the University of Mons in 2017.
Over the years, I also gained experiences in web and mobile development, DevOps and project managemenent.
My current interests are research works on arithmetization-oriented cryptographic primitives efficient in zero-knowledge protocols and in standard CPU architectures, cybersecurity and low-level code optimisations. Nowadays, I like getting my hands dirty coding in C, OCaml and Rust. Constantly requiring to be in an intellectually stimulating environment.
Regarding my personality, I am a curious person, I appreciate debating respectfully. I enjoy being surrounded by self-minded and respectful people, but I need to be in my world more than the average.