MEET OUR TEAM

We're a team of intellectually curious and deeply technical infrastructure builders on a mission to scale IBC.

Bo Du - Technical Lead

Bo Du

Technical Staff

Bo was the first hire at Chronosphere (unicorn) and infrastructure engineer at Uber and Capsule8 (acquired). His focus is on database, distributed systems and software infrastructure with experience developing M3DB (OSS time series database).

Peter Kim

Peter Kim

operational staff

Peter consulted for Ernst & Young’s Strategy and Innovation divisions. His focus has been on GtM strategy, new product launch/scale, organizational restructuring, and synergy capture with experience connecting partnerships and joint-builds in DeFi.

Wenwei Xiong

Technical Staff

Wenwei delivered database platforms at Paradigm 4 to leading pharmaceutical companies identifying biomarkers for diseases including COVID-19. At Avitide (acquired by Repligen), Wenwei led a team creating biologics databases. Wenwei's academic research and software tools have been cited 800+ times and helped secure $3.7M+ funding from NSF.

Derek Shiell

Technical Staff

Derek was a distinguished engineer at EdgeCast CDN where he spent the last 11+ years building and scaling the caching and compute platforms. During his time there, he helped it grow into a global platform delivering terabits per second of data and billions of client requests per day across hundreds of data centers. Prior to EdgeCast, Derek worked for Epson Research and Development implementing face and object recognition, detection, and alignment algorithms.

Nicolas Pernas

Technical Staff

Nico was a Staff Engineer at Twilio where he helped build their WebRTC based real-time video product. He has also been at AWS, where he spent time working on the virtualisation stack that is the foundation of EC2. He started as an embedded engineer doing low level type of work: Linux kernel development, boot-loaders, high performance networking and IoT.

Lizhang Qin

Technical Staff

Lizhang was a technical lead at Uber on the Freight backend platform. At Uber, he worked on redesigning the backend with micro-services, an event-driven message bus, and related frontend work. Before that, he worked at Citadel Securities, built High-Frequency trading systems, and competed with other firms with low latency strategies. He also worked at Motorola and Morningstar.

Ethan Oak

Operational Staff

Ethan started his career in management consulting at McKinsey and was an early member of their Digital Asset practice. He developed McKinsey’s POV on the relevance of DeFi for institutions and the disruptive potential of digital assets in the gaming and metaverse space. He went on to lead strategy and operations at Space Runners, a fashion metaverse startup. Ethan has also spent 10 serving in the US Army National Guard as an Intelligence Analyst. He graduated with a BS in Business Analytics from MIT.

Alexander Eliseev

Technical Staff

Alex was a software engineer at Amazon for 5 years where he mostly worked on various Kindle initiatives, including Wordwise and a knowledge graph for books serving more than 2 million users. The following 4 years he spent in the startup world building ML and blockchain powered products. His focus is on distributed systems, infrastructure and AI.

Thomas Dekeyser

Technical Staff

Prior to joining Polymer, Thomas was a Developer Relations at Interchain GmbH working on IBC, combining his passion for learning/teaching with empowering communities through web3 technology. Thomas spent his twenties doing a lot of learning, both formal (Master in Photonics Engineering, Master in Blockchain Technologies) and informal (how organisations work, self-taught web development, psychology). Ultimately this journey led him towards blockchain technology and a move from his native Belgium to Berlin. In the future, he envisions interchain development powered by IBC to be as pervasive as web2 technology is today.

Gabriel Perez Carafa

OPerational Staff

Gabriel is a rising senior studying economics and computer programming at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining Polymer, he worked as a technical research writer for Alchemy where he covered ZK-infrastructure topics . He currently serves as President of Blockchain@USC. He envisions blockchain interoperability enabling a new global financial system of the future where entities on opposite ends of the world can transact seamlessly and instantaneously.

Stefano Fenzo

OPerational Staff

Stefano is passionate about empowering companies to shape compelling stories. Prior to Polymer, Stefano applied his product design background to marketing, working cross-functionally to execute the go-to market strategy for Modyo, generating 1.1 million video views and a 15% uptick in pitch-to-close rates that contributed to a 200% revenue increase. Early on, Stefano helped 40 SMEs grow their businesses by leading 100+ digital projects through his agency, MedioDigital. Today, his focus is to incentivize Web3 adoption by distilling difficult concepts into simplified messages.

Zhengyang Feng

Technical staff

Zhengyang was a Staff Engineer at Momenta where he led the design and development of a sophisticated large-scale simulation workflow system. He also built a data product that empowered ML engineers to search and visualize data more efficiently. Prior to Momenta, Zhengyang worked at Uber, where he focused on building logging and metrics platforms as an Infrastructure Engineer. He also worked at Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg.

Johanna Tseng

operational Staff

Johanna comes from Coinbase as a Corporate Development leader, where she built the M&A operations function, acquiring and operationalizing 7 businesses. She previously spent time at Twilio and WeWork, scaling those businesses with new product lines (e.g., IoT, SEO, workplace strategy software) and markets (e.g., Brazil, Israel) through acquisitions. Her focus is on developing and executing strategic plans to drive growth and achieve business objectives.

Stephanie Balderrama

operational Staff

Stephanie is a leader in office operations and human resources, driven by her passion to steer organizations towards their strategic objectives. Prior to joining Polymer, she played a vital role in crafting and implementing processes to enhance overall efficiency for founders and C-suite executives. Stephanie brings to Polymer a specialized focus on the integration of human capital, organizational structure, and process management.

OUR ADVISORS

We've brought together strategic partners and experts to help us execute on our multi-chain vision.

Mustafa Al-Bassam

co-founder of Celestia

Mustafa is a co-founder of Celestia, the first modular blockchain network. He completed a PhD in Computer Science at UCL, where he published various research papers on blockchain layer 1 scalability. Previously, he was the co-founder of blockchain scalability startup Chainspace (acquired by Facebook).

CAREERS

Interested in a career with us at Polymer?

We’re always looking for talented individuals interested in working on problems in web3 interoperability infrastructure. Click the link below to get in touch.

Get in touch