Alex Romanov is the CTO and co-founder of Beam Privacy, a privacy-focused blockchain. He is an experienced software engineer and architect with over two decades of expertise in constructing intricate systems and guiding teams. ^[1]

Education

Romanov attended The Academic College of Tel-Aviv, Yaffo, from 2001-2003 and graduated with a BA in Computer Science. He later pursued an MA in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University and graduated in 2007. ^[2]

Career

Romanov began as a programmer at Comverse from August 2003 to December 2006 before transitioning to a team leader at RadView for 11 months from December 2006 to October 2007. During this period, he contributed to the development of performance-testing products. ^[2]

In subsequent years, he was a team leader at Boxee from October 2007 to November 2010, where he led the design and development of an open-source media center. His leadership continued at Collactive as an R&D and product manager, focusing on community management tools for social networks from November 2010 to May 2011. Following this, he worked on distributed video editing systems as a team leader at Magisto for one year and five months. ^[2]

Romanov later took on the position of VP R&D at Music Lab LTD for over four years, managing an R&D division in the Ad Tech space from November 2012 to January 2017. Subsequently, he served as VP of R&D at Personalics for eight months, overseeing the development of an email campaign optimization platform for large online retailers. ^[2]

He is currently the co-founder and CTO of Beam, a confidential cryptocurrency and DeFi project, a position he has held since March 2018. He manages a team of 40 professionals in this role, directing research and development and system architecture. ^[2]

Interviews

Beam Privacy/Mimblewimble

CyptoPotato interviewed Romanov in 2018 about Beam’s Mimblewimble-based coin. When asked about why he chose Mimblewimble, he answered: ^[3]

“About seven months ago, in February of this year, a longtime friend of mine approached me. He shared the idea of implementing the Mimblewimble protocol, and I was immediately intrigued. The technology seemed interesting, innovative, and the protocol itself appeared to be extremely elegant.”

“Mimblewimble solves two out of three major problems with Bitcoin today: privacy, confidentiality, and the size of the blockchain."

Blockchain Privacy

In a 2022 interview with CryptoNewsZ, Romanov discussed why Beam values privacy in the blockchain space: ^[4]

“We believe the right to privacy is a fundamental human right. We all deserve to have control over sensitive personal information and also the ability to choose what information we wish to share, if any. This right extends to financial privacy as well.”

He went on to explain how traditional blockchains don’t provide complete anonymity: ^[4]

“Traditional blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are pseudo-anonymous, meaning wallet addresses are not tied to personal identity. Each time a transaction is conducted, its metadata (including sender & receiver’s wallet addresses, transaction time, and token amount) are publicly broadcasted and permanently on the blockchain…If an adversary establishes a link between a wallet address and its owner’s identity, it can view the contents of the wallet as well as its entire transaction history.”

Romanov then explained how Beam addressed this problem using the Mimblewimble privacy protocol: ^[4]

“Beam is our answer to Bitcoin’s inherent privacy problems, scalability issues, and lack of smart contracts…Beam uses a combination of Lelantus, Mimblewimble & Dandelion privacy-preserving protocols creating shielded UTXOs with strong anonymity sets, making it virtually impossible to establish links between different UTXOs.”