Taiyang Zhang is a serial entrepreneur. He is a Co-founder of Ren Protocol and served as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company before moving to an advisory role. He was a Venture Partner at Alameda Research and a Founding Member of KeeperDAO. ^[1][5]

Early Life & Education

Taiyang Zhang was born in Canberra, Australia. He studied Computer Science at the Australian National University for less than one year. ^[2]

“I used to program when I was around 14 or so, and at the time, [we] were building a lot of hacking services,” recalls Zhang in his early Bitcoin years. ^[4]

Career

In 2014, Taiyang Zhang founded Neucode, a software development agency alongside Loong Wang and Jaz Gulati. Zhang also co-founded the crypto hedge fund Virgil Capital — a multi-national, multi-strat quantitative firm trading cryptocurrencies. ^[3]

Ren Protocol

Originally called Republic Protocol and headquartered in Singapore, Ren was founded in July 2017 by Taiyang Zhang and Loong Wang. Zhang served as the company's CEO, Loong Wang as its Chief Technology Officer, and Jaz Gulati as its Lead Developer. ^[8]

Ren was launched in January 2018, with Zhang citing its primary use case as a "decentralized dark pool for cryptocurrency trading." ^[4]

“There was massive demand for Bitcoin. It made sense to have some kind of formalized exchange for that,” - Taiyang on how the idea for Ren Protocol was developed.
It’s a setup that functions well within the traditional equity world, he thought, so why couldn’t there be something similar for cryptocurrencies?^[4]

Ren's main function is to act as a custodian for digital assets while they are moved between different blockchains. This involves securing the assets and generating corresponding tokens on the destination blockchain. ^[8]

In January 2019, Ren participated in the release of the whitepaper introducing Wrapped Bitcoin. The paper introduced the notion of "wrapped" tokens, utilizing Ethereum's ERC-20 token standard. ^[9]

"Dark pools were created out of a need and that need is when someone has a large volume order and wants to trade it in the best possible way. It also aids transparency. A decentralized dark pool is very important because the rule set on where everybody is trading is very transparent and there are no bribes in the system" - Taiyang Zhang explains in an interview^[11]

In February 2021, the Ren development team joined Alameda Research. ^[12]

"Together, with our collective experience, expertise, and communities, our two teams will be able to contribute more value to the blockchain space than alone"

"As part of joining Alameda, the Ren development team will be prioritising support for Solana in our Multichain libraries, and in RenVM itself. This support is currently under audit, and we anticipate that we will be able to begin bridging assets to/from Solana in Q2. Doing so will have a profound impact on Serum, but also on the wider Solana ecosystem." - Taiyang stated in the press release ^[12]

With the announcement, Taiyang Zhang and his co-founder Loong Wang, moved to advisory roles to guide the next phase of Ren Protocol. ^[13]

KeeperDAO

In 2019, Taiyang Zhang and Tiantian Kullander co-founded and jointly managed KeeperDAO. It was the collaborative effort between Kullander's Amber Group - a crypto trading and market-making firm and Zhang's Talo Systems- a blockchain research firm. ^[1]

Automera

In 2022, Zhang co-founded Automera — a biotechnology research company focusing on the development of Autophagy-Targeting Chimera small molecules (AUTACs). Automera's $16M round was co-led by Temasek-backed venture builder. ^[2][7]

QDX

In 2023, Zhang co-founded QDX, a computational drug discovery platform powered by quantum mechanics. The platform provides better predictions, unprecedented receptor-ligand insights, and the opportunity to crack challenging targets. ^[6][2]

"From structural biology to the design of new chemical matter, our quantum-first drug discovery platform brings the cutting edge of computational chemistry to your team." - QDX website expands ^[10]