Calisto Mathias

Cryptographer at heart · privacy engineer · founder of Umbra

---

I build privacy infrastructure, and I'm genuinely in love with cryptography.

Give me a zero-knowledge circuit that won't satisfy, a no_std on-chain program with no room to spare, or a Lean proof that refuses to close — and I'm exactly where I want to be. What pulls me in is the craft of it: constructions that are provably correct, implementations that are byte-exact, and the quiet thrill of turning hard mathematics into something real people can rely on.

☁️  What I'm building

Umbra — a multi-chain privacy protocol, and the hardest, most rewarding engineering I've ever taken on. It runs the full stack of applied cryptography: zero-knowledge circuits (Groth16 · Circom), no_std Solana programs, pairing-based BLS aggregation over BN254, Poseidon commitments, protocol-safety proofs formalized in Lean 4, and hand-written native crypto for mobile.

🔐  The cryptography I'm chasing

Zero-knowledge proofs · pairing-based cryptography · hash-based commitments · secure computation · formal verification. I'm not there yet — but I get a little sharper every single day, and that climb is the entire point.

🌱  Along the way

• 🏆  EthIndia '24 winner — best on-chain dApp at Polygon zkEVM
• 🌞  Google Summer of Code '24 with Haiku
• 🌊  Open source with Braidpool
• 🎓  Information Technology at NITK Surathkal
• 🎹  A mechanical-keyboard habit, and 🔢  a lasting soft spot for pure maths

💬  Say hello

umbraprivacy.com  ·  LinkedIn  ·  cal@umbraprivacy.com  ·  calistomathias.work@gmail.com

---

_{Privacy is a right — I'm building the math that makes it the default.}