Howard Wu
Howard Wu is an American cryptographer and entrepreneur known as a founder and the first chief executive officer of the privacy-focused blockchain project Aleo. Based in the United States, he has built his career around zero-knowledge proofs and elliptic-curve cryptography. [1][2] In addition to Aleo, Wu is co-founder and CEO of Provable, an Aleo Labs company, managing partner of Dekrypt Capital, and CEO of ShieldFi (also styled ShieldApp).[3][2]
Education
Howard Wu earned a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley (2018). He previously completed a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at UC Berkeley (2012–2016). [1]
Career
Early Roles and Investing
Wu began his professional career around his university years. He worked as a search engineer at Google from January 2016 to January 2017, and later held a software engineer role at the company from approximately 2018 to 2019.[4][3] During this period he was also involved with Blockchain at Berkeley, a student and research organization at his alma mater, where he is described as a co-founder and served as an advisor from January 2016 to January 2022.[3][4]
In January 2017 Wu became managing partner at Dekrypt Capital, a cryptocurrency investment firm that he is also credited with co-founding.[1][3]
Aleo
Wu is a founder and the first chief executive officer of Aleo, a blockchain protocol that uses zero-knowledge technology to enhance digital privacy. Aleo's stated mission is to build a secure and privacy-first internet by enabling privacy-preserving applications through zero-knowledge proofs.[4][1][3]
Wu served as co-founder and CEO of Aleo Systems from December 2019 until November 2022. In a company release dated November 2022, he handed the CEO title to Alex Pruden and became the company's chief technology officer.[3]
Provable
Following a reorganization of the Aleo effort, Wu became co-founder and CEO of Provable, beginning in November 2022.[3] As an author on Provable's site, Wu has been associated with posts including "Introducing ARC-0046: Strengthening Aleo Network Security Through Prover Staking," "Discover Provable," and "Welcome to Provable," the latter two documenting the company's transition and identity.[5]
ShieldFi
Wu is CEO of ShieldFi, also referred to as ShieldApp, an on-chain privacy protocol positioned for regulated institutions. He has framed the project around the argument that earlier privacy protocols "ignored compliance, which put them out of reach for regulated institutions," and that traders need to protect their trading activity while still meeting regulatory requirements.[2]
To illustrate the problem ShieldFi addresses, Wu described meeting with a trading firm that used fresh addresses across different networks in the belief that its activity could not be linked. He said his team tested this assumption by indexing recent blocks across those networks and cross-correlating trades by size and gas, demonstrating that supposedly separate addresses could be tied together.[2]
Cryptographic Contributions
Wu's research work centers on zero-knowledge proofs and elliptic-curve cryptography. His profile identifies him as a co-author of libsnark, a widely used C++ library for succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs; DIZK, a system for distributed zero-knowledge proof generation; and Zexe, a construction for decentralized private computation.[2] He was a 2018 co-author of the Zexe paper on decentralized private computation, the design later implemented by Aleo.[3]
