Sergey Gorbunov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Axelar Network, a blockchain network that connects blockchains, providing Web3 interoperability. ^[1][3][10]

Education

Sergey Gorbunov received his B.Sc., in Computer Science, Information Security Specialist from the University of Toronto in 2011. In 2012, he received his Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. ^[1]

In 2015, Gorbunov received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was a Microsoft Ph.D. fellow. His academic advisor was Vinod Vaikuntanathan. His dissertation was on designing cryptographic tools for the cloud using lattice-based cryptography for which he received Sprowls Doctoral Thesis Prize for best Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science at MIT. ^[1][2]

Career

Early Career

In 2009, Sergey Gorbunov was a Researcher and Software Developer at The Honeynet Project. In 2010, he was a Teaching Assistant at the University of Toronto. He spent 3 months at IBM in 2013 as a Crypto Researcher. In 2014, he was a Research Assitant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2015, he was the founder and CTO of Stealthmine. ^[1]

Algorand

Sergey Gorbunov was a founding team member at Algorand, a blockchain protocol that allows anyone to build applications and transfer value on a decentralized, permissionless network. At Algorand, Gorbunov was the Chief Cryptographer and he was also responsible for the design and development of the platform. ^[1][4]

Axelar

Sergey Gorbunov co-founded Axelar alongside Georgios Vlachos in June 2020. Axelar Network is a decentralized transport layer that offers secure cross-chain messages across Web3. It provides a uniform cross-chain messaging solution for developers and users. Developers can utilize Axelar gateway contracts to connect to EVM contracts on any chain without making modifications to their chains or UIs. ^[3][5]

"The basic problem that we're trying to solve is to allow users and developers to interact and compose across multiple ecosystems in an easy way and so we're building a decentralized network and a set of sdks and services around it to solve that" - Sergey Gorbunov

According to Gorbunov, for the development of Axelar, the team will continue growing the number of integrations being supported by the Axelar Network, they'll continue growing the team from engineering to content creation, etc. and they'll also continue supporting application builders that want to go cross-chain.

"The first objective that we wanted to achieve is to make sure the developers don't have to learn another language to interact and go across chain so the Axelar network has been designed with the principle that as a developer you can go and build on any
platform that you're most comfortable with" - Sergey Gorbunov ^[11]

Teaching

Sergey Gorbunov is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. ^[1]

Teaching

• Winter 2020: CS458/658 - Computer Security and Privacy. UWaterloo.
• Fall 2017: CS 456 - Computer Networks. UWaterloo.
• Fall 2016: CS458/658 - Computer Security and Privacy. UWaterloo.
• Fall 2015: CS858 Topics Course in Computing on Encrypted Data. UWaterloo.
• Fall 2013: CSC347 - Introduction to Information Security. UofT.

He is also a technical advisor to EU FENTEC Project: Increasing Trustworthiness of ICT solutions developing Functional Encryption Systems. ^[5]

Publications

• Can a Public Blockchain Keep a Secret?
  Fabrice Benhamouda, Craig Gentry, Sergey Gorbunov, Shai Halevi, Hugo Krawczyk, Tal Rabin, and Leonid Reyzin.
  Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2020 ^[6]
• Pointproofs: Aggregating Proofs for Multiple Vector Commitments
  Sergey Gorbunov, Leonid Reyzin, Hoeteck Wee, and Zhenfei Zhang
  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2020 ^[7]
• Pixel: Multi-Signatures for Consensus 
  Manu Drijvers, Sergey Gorbunov, Gregory Neven, and Hoeteck Wee
  USENIX Security 2020
  Pencil - Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Cryptography in Ledgers 2019 ^[8]
• Efficient Evaluation of Activation Functions over Encrypted Data
  Patricia Thaine, Sergey Gorbunov, and Gerald Penn
  IEEE 2nd Deep Learning and Security Workshop 2019
• StealthDB: a Scalable Encrypted Database with Full SQL Query Support 
  Alexey Gribov, Dhinakaran Vinayagamurthy, and Sergey Gorbunov
  Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2019 ^[9]