Our greatest asset is our team!
Collectively our team has 35+ years working in the IPFS ecosystem across a range of projects!
In order of longevity…
lidel
Role: Specification and open standards champion, software engineer
First IPFS contribution: 2015
Lidel started first as a community contributor, creating IPFS Companion. He joined Protocol Labs a few years later to work full time on IPFS, where he has been a fierce advocate specifications and IPFS in web browsers, which has had him in the thick of first-party integrations like IPFS in Brave and IPFS in Chromium.
hsanjuan
First IPFS contribution: 2016
Hector joined Protocol Labs in 2016 as lead developer of the IPFS Cluster project. As part of this and other efforts, he has contributed to many pieces of the IPFS stack. He wrote Merkle-CRDTs: Merkle-DAGs meet CRDTs, and implemented a key-value store based on Merkle-CRDTs. He has also worked on deploying and maintaining production infrastructure for IPFS, Drand and Filecoin. More recently he’s been working on IPFS HTTP gateways and content-filtering for IPFS, authoring the specification for a new denylist format and implementing support in Kubo.
aschmahmann
Role: Software Engineer
First IPFS contribution: 2018
Before joining Protocol Labs in 2018, Adin worked as a researcher and founder in spaces involving peer-to-peer technologies and cryptography to make communicating and sharing data safer, faster and more reliable. As a core maintainer of IPFS libraries, Adin has worked across the stack including libp2p and Filecoin. Adin marinates in customer use cases and has a knack of identifying common problems and then showing how IPFS-related technology can be used to solve the problems at hand.
achingbrain
Role: Software Engineer
First IPFS contribution: 2018
Alex joined Protocol Labs in early 2018 to work on the js-IPFS project. He’s since taken on js-libp2p and recently created Helia, a new IPFS implementation in JavaScript. He is a contributor to most parts of the IPFS/libp2p JavaScript stack and has published several popular open source libraries.
gammazero
Role: Software Engineer
First IPFS contribution: 2020
Andrew joined Protocol Labs in 2020, to work on go-ipfs and related golang projects. Since then, he contributed to IPFS, IPLD, Filecoin, and IPNI projects. At IP Shipyard, he is focused on improving IPFS and related projects. Andrews also continues to help maintain IPNI as well as contributes to other projects involving PL technologies.
SgtPooki
Role: Software Engineer
First IPFS contribution: 2022
Russell joined Protocol Labs in early 2022 and handled maintenance and improvements for IPFS Desktop, IPFS Web UI, explore.ipld.io, the IPFS public-gateway-checker, and various other libraries, tools, and applications. He has helped organizations throughout Protocol Labs by interviewing potential candidates and assisting with hackathon mentoring & judging. Russell is passionate about improving DX for internal and external teams while building performant software that can scale. Russell now helps to maintain Helia and js-libp2p and runs the Helia Working Group. Russell is an ex-senior Software Engineer and Bar-Raiser from AWS, an ex-Nerdery Co-President, ex-PayPal Engineer, and he is proud to mention that he is a USAF veteran.
cewood
Role: Engineering Manager
First IPFS contribution: 2022
Cameron joined Protocol Labs in late 2022 as an Engineering Manager in the Engineering Research group, managing the Bifrost team, who are responsible for various critical components. That includes the IPFS.io gateway, JS preload nodes, Libp2p/DHT Bootstrap nodes, the IPFS Collab clusters (which provide various Wikipedia mirrors, Filecoin proofs, PL/IPFS website pinning), and the Badbits deny list, among other responsibilities. Before joining Protocol Labs, Cameron was honing his expertise in distributed systems by contributing to various organisations, ranging from innovative startups to large multinational enterprises, such as Atlassian, Rocket Internet, Ververica/Alibaba, and Kraken.
Daniel
Role: Developer Advocate
First IPFS contribution: 2022
Daniel joined Protocol Labs in 2022 as a Developer Advocate for the IPFS Project. Daniel’s background is as a software engineer with broad experience across modern web, cloud environments and distributed systems. In recent years, Daniel’s shifted to developer advocacy and have been fascinated by the overlap between open-source, community building, and software development. He’s passionate about open-source, decentralisation, and modern development tooling and like bringing ideas from different disciplines to software development.
Guillaume Michel
Role: Research Engineer, ProbeLab
First IPFS Contribution: 2019
Guillaume joined Protocol Labs in 2022 as a Research Engineer, focusing on peer-to-peer protocol design and analysis, especially in areas like content routing and Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). He holds a joint Master’s degree in Computer Science - Cybersecurity from EPFL and ETH Zurich. With prior experience at Cisco and IBM Research Europe, Guillaume has been involved in various projects related to network security and efficiency. His work is driven by a passion for advancing Internet Decentralization, Privacy, and the Free/Libre Open Source Software movement, aiming to shape a more secure and accessible digital future.
Dennis Trautwein
Role: Research Engineer, ProbeLab
First IPFS Contribution: 2021
Dennis Trautwein joined Protocol Labs in September 2022. He is the author of the most popular IPFS crawler to date, Nebula. He is also one of the most major developers of the infrastructure behind https://probelab.io as well as the measurement tools used to evaluate the performance of P2P layer protocols. He is passionate about rigorous performance evaluation and the infrastructure needed to support it. In parallel to his work at Protocol Labs and now IP Shipyard, he is pursuing a PhD on “Peer to peer systems in trustless environments”.
yiannisbot
Role: Team Lead & Engineering Manager, ProbeLab
First IPFS Contribution: 2019
Yiannis Psaras has been a Research Scientist and then Engineering Manager at Protocol Labs since 2020. He has worked on several parts of the “InterPlanetary” stack, including, among others, libp2p’s Gossipsub, the IPFS Amino DHT, Bitswap and drand. He is an advocate of content addressing since long before he joined Protocol Labs and has a passion for decentralised Internet Services and technologies. He is currently leading the ProbeLab team (https://probelab.io), which focuses on performance monitoring and measurements of the P2P layer of Web3.0. Before joining Protocol Labs, Yiannis was an academic at University College London, where he conducted research on Future Internet technologies and network-layer protocols.
ns
Role: Infrastructure Engineer, IPFS
First IPFS Contribution: 2022
Joined Protocol Labs in 2022 to work on the public IPFS gateway - ipfs.io. Responsible for maintaining all systems operational 24/7 and serving terabytes of traffic every month. Current efforts include rolling-out Rainbow - the fast and resource-efficient IPFS HTTP gateway - across all global locations.
MarcoPolo
Role: Software Engineer, libp2p
First libp2p Contribution: 2021
Nobody likes getting woken up at 2 AM from a page because some centralized system is down. After one too many interrupted nights, Marco looked elsewhere for how to scale complex systems. This search brought a renewed interest in decentralized technologies and a collaboration with libp2p and Protocol Labs. 3 years later Marco is still improving on libp2p in general and go-libp2p specifically. Marco strives to improve libp2p as a whole and has contributed to go-libp2p, rust-libp2p, js-libp2p, and zig-libp2p.
Advisors
biglep
First IPFS contribution: 2021
Steve has served as engineering manager starting in 2021 on Protocol Labs’ Engineering Research group managing the IPFS, libp2p, and IPDX engineering teams. Prior to being enlightened to the joys and challenges of decentralized protocols and organizations, he was schooled in software development, engineering leadership, and operational excellence with fifteen years at Amazon and AWS.
hsanjuan
First IPFS contribution: 2016
Hector joined Protocol Labs in 2016 as lead developer of the IPFS Cluster project. As part of this and other efforts, he has contributed to many pieces of the IPFS stack. He wrote Merkle-CRDTs: Merkle-DAGs meet CRDTs, and implemented a key-value store based on Merkle-CRDTs. He has also worked on deploying and maintaining production infrastructure for IPFS, Drand and Filecoin. More recently he’s been working on IPFS HTTP gateways and content-filtering for IPFS, authoring the specification for a new denylist format and implementing support in Kubo.