Ying Tong Lai (Chinese: 映彤) is the co-founder of the peer-to-peer code collaboration platform Radicle, her technical and community-building work with the Ethereum Foundation and 0xPARC on zero-knowledge proofs, and her entrepreneurial ventures, including Snickerdoodle Labs and Another Internet. Her work spans applied cryptography, developer community organization, and the practical application of blockchain technology to social and data privacy challenges. ^{[1] [2] [3]}​

Education and Early Career

Originally from Singapore, Lai pursued a university degree in philosophy. Before transitioning into the technology sector, she worked in the public sector in her home country. Sources suggest an affiliation with Yale-NUS College, as an article she authored in 2019 for RadicalxChange Singapore documented a PechaKucha event hosted at the college. Lai has stated that her move into the crypto space was driven by a sense of disillusionment with "the state of our capitalistic society," seeking to leverage technology to foster a more equitable and decentralized world. Her personal website carries the motto "no flex be kind," reflecting a value-driven approach to her work. ^{[2] [4]}

Career

Ying Tong Lai's career is marked by a progression through various high-profile roles in the decentralized technology space, from co-founding foundational infrastructure projects and working within major ecosystem organizations to leading independent research and launching new companies.

Early Crypto Ventures (2017–2019)

Lai's entry into the blockchain space involved hands-on development and community organizing centered on social impact. In 2017, she was a backend and smart contract developer for the RadXChange team at the Hack4Climate event in Bonn, Germany. The project was proposed as a "fully decentralized and autonomous exchange for verified carbon assets," aiming to use Ethereum smart contracts to bring efficiency and transparency to the fragmented carbon market. ^[1]​

By 2019, she was an active contributor to the RadicalxChange Singapore chapter. In a detailed article, she analyzed a local event focused on "blockchain for social impact." Her writing demonstrated an early-stage critical and nuanced perspective, extracting key strategies used by projects, such as disintermediation and cryptoeconomic incentives, while also pointing out significant challenges. She highlighted the ecosystem's dependence on trusted oracles, which she noted complicated the "trustless" narrative of the technology, and advocated for a rigorous, context-based evaluation of blockchain use cases to move beyond industry hype. ^[4]​

Radicle and Monadic

Lai is a co-founder of Monadic, the entity that developed Radicle, and a co-founder of the Radicle project itself. During this period, her professional base was in Berlin, Germany. Radicle is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and software stack created for decentralized code collaboration. It was designed as a secure, censorship-resistant alternative to centralized platforms like GitHub, allowing developers to share and manage code without relying on intermediaries. Her role in co-founding this foundational piece of decentralized infrastructure established her as a significant builder in the space, and she represented the project as a speaker at major industry conferences like ETHDenver. ^[1]​

Electric Coin Co.

Around April 2020, Lai joined the Electric Coin Co. (ECC), the company responsible for the development of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash. In her role as an engineer, her work centered on blockchain interoperability. She specifically mentioned her focus on building "bridges" to connect the Zcash and Ethereum ecosystems, a technically challenging endeavor aimed at increasing cross-chain liquidity and functionality. She publicly announced her role in May 2020, expressing her excitement for the project. ^[3]​

Ethereum Foundation and 0xPARC

Lai held multiple significant roles within the Ethereum ecosystem, contributing to both its community growth and its technical advancement. As an "Orchestrator" on the Ethereum Foundation's Devcon team, she was part of the core group responsible for organizing Devcon, the ecosystem's largest and most important developer conference. She was also involved in the creation of Devconnect, a nomadic event series designed by the foundation to foster collaboration. ^[2]​

Concurrently, she served as a Developer Relations Engineer for the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team, a research and development group within the Ethereum Foundation. This role involved empowering developers by creating resources and providing support for privacy and scaling technologies. ^[4]​

Lai was also heavily involved with 0xPARC (Program for Applied Research in Cryptography), a prominent research organization in the field. She led community initiatives and produced educational materials for the group. At Devcon Bogotá in October 2022, she hosted the "Future of Proving Systems" session on behalf of 0xPARC. This high-profile event featured a lineup of leading experts from top ZK projects, including the Privacy & Scaling Explorations team, Aztec, Scroll, Polygon Hermez, StarkWare, O(1) Labs, and Gnark, cementing her position as a key community organizer in the advanced cryptography space. After this period of intense work, Lai described herself as being in an "unemployed era" in July 2024, indicating a time of independent work or transition. ^[3]​

Entrepreneurial Ventures

Following her work with established organizations, Lai shifted her focus to founding new ventures. She is the co-founder and CEO of Snickerdoodle Labs, a web3 data privacy company. The company's mission is to build a "data-sharing layer where users own their data and earn rewards from it," directly addressing issues of data sovereignty and monetization in the digital age. ^[2]​

She is also the founder of a project named "Another Internet," which aligns with her long-standing interest in peer-to-peer technologies and social protocols. ^[1]​

As of early 2026, her speaker biography for ETHDenver 2026 described her as an Applied Cryptographer working "in stealth" on a new venture, which may relate to Snickerdoodle Labs, Another Internet, or another unannounced project. ^[5]​

Research and Contributions

Lai's work is characterized by deep technical expertise in applied cryptography, combined with a commitment to education and community-building.

Zero-Knowledge Cryptography

Lai's primary technical focus is on zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography and its applications. Her work delves into advanced concepts within the field, and she is known for making them more accessible to a broader technical audience. Her specific interests include privacy for coordination, purpose limitation in data use, and privacy-preserving digital identity. ^[5]​

Key contributions in this area include:

• Arithmetisation Research: In January 2023, she released a collection of technical notes explaining arithmetisations, a foundational step in designing ZK proof systems. ^[3]
• Folding Schemes Analysis: In April 2023, she published diagrams and explanations to clarify the complex relationships between different folding schemes, such as Sangria, Origami, split accumulation, and halo2's atomic accumulation. Folding is a technique used to improve the efficiency of recursive proof systems. ^[3]
• CycleFold Explanation: To help demystify the CycleFold protocol, she created an animated GIF in November 2023 that visually explained its mechanics, linking to the corresponding academic paper. ^[3]
• ZKProof Standards: Lai is a contributor to the ZKProof Standards initiative, an open, collaborative effort between industry and academia to standardize the security and interoperability of zero-knowledge proof systems. Her work has specifically focused on the standardization of generic zk-SNARKs. ^[5]

Community and Educational Projects

Lai has launched and contributed to several projects aimed at organizing knowledge and resources for the developer community.

• halo2.club: On October 3, 2023, Lai announced the launch of halo2.club, a community-maintained website that acts as a comprehensive directory for resources related to the halo2 ZK proving system and its variants. She credited the awesome-halo2 repository as a major inspiration for the project. ^[3]
• awesome-decentralized-web: She is listed as a contributor to awesome-decentralized-web, a popular and widely referenced GitHub repository that curates a list of resources, projects, and influential people within the decentralized web community. ^[1]

Public Appearances and Views

Lai is an active public speaker and writer who uses her platform to educate the community and advocate for a more inclusive and ethically-grounded approach to technology.

Speaking Engagements

She has been a featured speaker at numerous major industry events, sharing her expertise on topics ranging from peer-to-peer infrastructure to advanced cryptography. Notable appearances include:

• ETHDenver: Lai has been listed as a speaker at ETHDenver on multiple occasions, representing her work with Radicle in earlier years and listed as an "Applied Cryptographer" for the 2026 conference. ^{[5] [1]}
• Devcon Bogotá (2022): As a representative of 0xPARC, she organized and hosted the "Future of Proving Systems" session, facilitating a discussion among the foremost experts in the ZK field. ^[3]
• Hack4Climate: She presented as part of a Pecha Kucha-style session at a Hack4Climate event, demonstrating an early commitment to applying decentralized technology to global challenges. ^[4]

Philosophy and Advocacy

Across her various roles and platforms, Lai consistently advocates for a value-driven development ethos. She has stated her passion for "creating a more decentralized and equitable world through technology" and for making "web3 more inclusive for everyone." Her personal blog indicates a pragmatic interest in curating "good use cases, that are actually not bullshit use cases, of 'blockchain'," signaling a desire to focus on real-world utility over speculation. Her active social media presence on X (formerly Twitter) under the handle @therealyingtong is a platform for sharing technical insights, project updates, and educational content, with a stated interest in "building non-hierarchical infrastructures." ^{[2] [3]}​

Interviews

Intelligent Cooperation Between MPC and ZK Proofs #01

In an interview published on the Silence Laboratories YouTube channel on October 6, 2023, Ying Tong Lai discusses the relationship between Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Non-Interactive Proofs (NIPs), and Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (ZK-SNARKs). The discussion reflects her technical perspective on how these cryptographic paradigms intersect and address complementary limitations.

Lai relates her interest in this topic to implementation work involving the SHA-256 circuit in Zabo, which exposed structural similarities between MPC provers and ZK-SNARK provers. She characterizes ZK-SNARKs as proof systems that enable public verification while preserving witness privacy, with the constraint that a single prover typically performs the full computation. MPC systems, in contrast, distribute computation across multiple parties but do not inherently provide public mechanisms to verify honest execution in the presence of collusion.

Within this context, Lai describes research efforts that combine properties from both approaches. One line of work focuses on adding public auditability to MPC proofs. Early constructions required verification of complete computation transcripts, resulting in linear-time verification. Subsequent approaches integrated ZK-SNARKs to produce constant-size proofs. She identifies the transition from circuit-specific systems, such as Pinocchio, to universal systems like Marlin as an important development, as it removed the need for protocol-specific trusted setup by relying on a reusable reference string.

The interview also outlines two models of multi-party ZK-SNARK proving. Delegated ZK-SNARKs involve a single prover distributing secret-shared witness data to multiple workers, enabling outsourced computation under the assumption of an honest delegator. Collaborative ZK-SNARKs generate proofs through MPC itself, with no participant holding the complete witness at any point, and typically require additional preprocessing. Lai associates delegated proving with scenarios involving limited computational resources or large circuits, while collaborative proving is presented as applicable in settings with stricter trust constraints.

Lai further describes the structure of the Marlin proving system, which consists of arithmetization, a polynomial interactive oracle proof, and a cryptographic polynomial commitment scheme. She notes that computational costs are concentrated in operations such as fast Fourier transforms and elliptic curve computations. As discussed in the interview, these costs motivate techniques including packed secret sharing and secret-shared elliptic curve operations in both delegated and collaborative proving systems.

The interview concludes with a discussion of open research questions. Lai points to ongoing efforts to identify zero-knowledge proof systems that integrate effectively with MPC, as well as to develop MPC implementations of common zero-knowledge primitives. She also notes the need for comparative evaluation and benchmarking of existing approaches, given the range of assumptions and system models involved. ^[6]