About Me

I’m Dave Hrycyszyn, and I’m a coder. I also like building up teams and organisations.

Born in northern Canada, a land of endless trees, lakes and rivers. As a young man, worked at a museum reconstructing antique firearms and shooting smoothbore artillery. It gave me a taste for researching and building strange things. Double-majored in history and political science. Self-taught software developer.

Moved to Cambridge (the UK one), then London, and co-founded a business building software for major companies across Europe. Grew to about 60 people, built hundreds of projects. Sold the company, then re-sold to the behemoth software engineering consultants Cognizant and got out. I like small organizations. I’m more Maas Biolabs than Hosaka, if you like your William Gibson refs.

Simultaneously, built cryptographic, social, and privacy-related software with friends. Started working on blockchain scaling in 2015, after noticing that Ethereum had big ambitions and one thread of execution for the whole planet.

Co-founder and CEO of Chainspace. Co-wrote a blockchain sharding protocol and what was probably the fastest BFT consensus algorithm at that point. Sold to Facebook in 2019. In terms of personnel, Chainspace was a precursor to Sui and Celestia, with some fascinating internal arguments about the merits of pBFT-descended systems vs Ethereum + Roll-ups. It’s an argument which continues to play out today.

Co-founded Nym, a successor to Tor, with a bunch of cypherpunks. Built and deployed the world’s first high-performance mixnet to defeat nation-state level surveillance. The zero-knowledge payments credentials solve the biggest problem with legacy VPNs - why use a centralized “private” system that can monitor your traffic and give their payment system your full name and home address?

Lately I’ve moved to co-found Side Protocol, to build the internet’s first pooled liquidity lending protocol for Bitcoin.

I’ve got a bunch of other plans up my sleeve too. They’re just waiting. Like Cthulhu.