I am an engineering leader with over two decades of experience across academia and industry, specializing in blockchain, security, and distributed systems. Most recently, I served as Head of Engineering at Aptos Labs, where I led the team to launch one of the fastest Layer 1 blockchains, forged deep ecosystem partnerships, and drove innovation across product, protocol, and organizational layers.

My journey with Aptos began in 2019 at Facebook (later Meta), where I joined the Libra/Diem blockchain initiative. I defined and led development of core inter-node protocols including blockchain RPC, validator security, on-chain governance, and production network bootstrapping. When Diem wound down in 2021, I founded Meta’s first Web3 team, building large-scale infrastructure that connected Facebook and Instagram to public blockchains such as Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon.

Unfortunately history was not on the side of Facebook or Diem and the Blockchain organization largely folded at the end of June 2021. Fortunately, these efforts did not go to waste as I bootstrapped a new team to tackle the growing interest in Web3 at Meta. We built the first large scale Web 2.5 platform that enabled Facebook, Instagram and other teams to interact with various Blockchains including Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon.

In early 2022, I re-joined forces with many of my former colleagues to launch Aptos. I led efforts to prepare for our mainnet launch by establishing standards and frameworks with an emphasis on usability and security, scaling performance in throughput and latency, and ensuring readiness for real workloads. Despite market headwinds like the FTX collapse, we strengthened the ecosystem through strategic partnerships (e.g., NPixel in gaming and delivered breakthrough innovations: decentralized social login (Keyless and AptosConnect), gas and storage that made Aptos the lowest-cost stablecoin transfer chain, Move objects for advances in fungible and nonfungible digital asset standards, and the technology powering million high fidelity NFTs in less than a minute. We also broke ground in high performance indexing and API service leading to what is now known as Geomi.

• Launching Graffio, the first decentralized collaborative drawing app, showcasing Aptos’ low-cost, high-throughput tech.
• Advancing Move, introducing dynamic dispatch and broadening developer accessibility.
• Driving breakthroughs, enabling sub-second peer-to-peer transfers and scaling TVL past $1B, earning Aptos a top-five ranking on RWA.xyz.
• Championing ecosystem expansion through satellites—independent regional teams beginning with Chinese-speaking regions with MoveMaker and Vietnam with AlphaTeam.
• The creation of a strong DevRel organization.
• Guiding major 2025 initiatives: Geomi for building, Decibel for trading, and Shelby for storage.

Before Aptos, my career was rooted in academia. I earned my B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, working with Professor Renato Figueiredo on network virtualization and grid computing. My doctoral work led to the development of IPOP, a OSS peer-to-peer virtual private network, and Grid Appliance, one of the first decentralized, cross-cloud computing platforms. I later joined Yale University as a Research Scientist in Professor Bryan Ford’s group, where I focused on privacy and anonymity. There, I co-led Dissent, a scalable anonymous group communication system (OSDI'12, USENIX SEC'13, CCS'13).

In 2015, I moved from academia to Facebook, where I shifted from research to impact at scale. I led teams in the Ads Growth organization, driving initiatives that improved advertiser adoption by over 10%, adding nearly a million sustained active advertisers.

Outside of work, I enjoy running, explore stocks, and more often than I'd like to admit play video games. I have done the Insanity Workout several times, I cannot recommend it enough as both a great way to get in shape but also amazing positive reinforcement. When I'm not running or flinging my body around, I enjoy sweets with my wife, Xiaofei, and watching Anime with my sons Isaac and Solomon. At one point, I was ranked in the top 20 on the US East Warcraft III Free For All Ladder.