Izaak Meckler (also known as Izzy) is the former CTO and CSO at O(1) Labs^[3], the team responsible for the development of the Mina Protocol (previously known as Coda Protocol). ^[1][2]

He transitioned to the role of an Advisor and Board Member of the company in December 2022. ^[4]

Education

Izaak Meckler attended the University of Chicago in 2011 and graduated with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2015. ^[1]

Career

Izaak Meckler started his career as a Programmer Teaching Assistant at the University of Chicago in 2012. From July 2012 to September 2012, he worked as Software Engineer Intern at Quixey. Meckler was a Tech Intern at Jane Street Capital from June 2013 to September 2013 where he created Embash, an EDSL in OCaml that compiles to Bash script. He moved on to become a Software Developer at Jane Street Capital from 2015 to 2016. He was a Ph.D. Student at UC Berkeley from 2016 to 2018. ^[1]

O(1) Labs

O(1) Labs is a software development company headquartered in San Francisco, CA that specializes in verifiable computation. The company has contributed to the development of Mina Protocol, an open-source software project that uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to create a blockchain with a fixed size of approximately 22kb.^[3][5]

O(1) Labs was founded by Izaak Meckler and Evan Shapiro in 2017 when they both started to research and solve the centralization and data security issues behind blockchains. The term O(1) originates from the Big-O notation in algorithmic complexity theory, which measures how long an algorithm takes as a function of its input. Algorithms with O(1) notation execute in constant time or space regardless of the size of the input data set, while other algorithms can be classified as O(n), O(logn), etc. ^[6]

Mina Protocol

Mina Protocol, previously known as Coda Protocol, is a blockchain that utilizes zero-knowledge proofs ("ZKP") and has a fixed size of 22KB. It operates as a layer-one ("L1") blockchain with smart contracts coded in TypeScript. ^[7]

Mina Protocol's succinct blockchain provides the O(1) property, meaning that the time required to verify the blockchain remains constant regardless of the number of processed transactions or the age of the chain. Therefore, the name O(1) Labs refers to this property. ^[5][6]

"Essentially, what happens in Coda (Mina Protocol) is that continually, we're producing a SNARK that attests to the correctness of the computation of verifying the blockchain up to that point" - Izaak Meckler