Howard Wu

Howard Wu is an American cryptographer and entrepreneur known as a founder and the first chief executive officer of the privacy-focused blockchain project Aleo, and as a co-author of several works in zero-knowledge cryptography, including libsnark, DIZK, and Zexe. Based in the United States, he has built his career around zero-knowledge proofs and elliptic-curve cryptography—techniques that allow one party to prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying data—and has applied them to blockchain systems intended to preserve user privacy.^[1][2] In addition to Aleo, Wu is co-founder and CEO of Provable, an Aleo Labs company, managing partner of Dekrypt Capital, and CEO of ShieldFi (also styled ShieldApp), a compliance-oriented on-chain privacy protocol.^[3][2]

Early Life and Education

Wu studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and applied mathematics, attending from 2012 to 2016.^[1] His field of study has also been described as electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS), and he completed a master's degree at Berkeley in 2018.^[4][3] He developed a research background in cryptography, computer security, and verifiable computing, the branch of computer science concerned with proving that a computation was carried out correctly.^[5][4]

Career

Early Roles and Investing

Wu began his professional career around his university years. He worked as a search engineer at Google from January 2016 to January 2017, and later held a software engineer role at the company from approximately 2018 to 2019.^[4][3] During this period he was also involved with Blockchain at Berkeley, a student and research organization at his alma mater, where he is described as a co-founder and served as an advisor from January 2016 to January 2022.^[3][4]

In January 2017 Wu became managing partner at Dekrypt Capital, a cryptocurrency investment firm that he is also credited with co-founding.^[1][3]

Aleo

Wu is a founder and the first chief executive officer of Aleo, a blockchain protocol that uses zero-knowledge technology to enhance digital privacy. Aleo's stated mission is to build a secure and privacy-first internet by enabling privacy-preserving applications through zero-knowledge proofs.^[4] Accounts of the founding date differ: his own profiles list the co-founder role as beginning in January 2019, while Aleo's official mainnet history records that he co-founded Aleo Systems in December 2019, together with Michael Beller, Collin Chin, and Raymond Chu.^[1][3]

Wu served as co-founder and CEO of Aleo Systems from December 2019 until November 2022. In a company release dated November 2022, he handed the CEO title to Alex Pruden and became the company's chief technology officer.^[3] Aleo was an early implementer of the Zexe design, which the project first built on testnet before its mainnet launch.^[3]

Provable

Following a reorganization of the Aleo effort, Wu became co-founder and CEO of Provable, described as an Aleo Labs company, with the role beginning in November 2022.^[3] His own profiles date the Provable role to January 2019, reflecting continuity with the original Aleo venture.^[1] As an author on Provable's site, Wu has been associated with posts including "Introducing ARC-0046: Strengthening Aleo Network Security Through Prover Staking," "Discover Provable," and "Welcome to Provable," the latter two documenting the company's transition and identity.^[5]

ShieldFi

Wu is CEO of ShieldFi, also referred to as ShieldApp, an on-chain privacy protocol positioned for regulated institutions. He has framed the project around the argument that earlier privacy protocols "ignored compliance, which put them out of reach for regulated institutions," and that traders need to protect their trading activity while still meeting regulatory requirements.^[2] Rather than making all activity fully opaque, ShieldFi was designed with a deliberate choice about how much information to keep confidential; Wu has said that although "the cryptography exists" to conceal everything, "the previous generation of privacy protocols treated total opacity as the" default approach, which the team rejected.^[2]

To illustrate the problem ShieldFi addresses, Wu described meeting with a trading firm that used fresh addresses across different networks in the belief that its activity could not be linked. He said his team tested this assumption by indexing recent blocks across those networks and cross-correlating trades by size and gas, demonstrating that supposedly separate addresses could be tied together.^[2] A related ShieldFi post invited readers to take any trader's address from a public automated market maker (AMM)—a smart contract that lets users swap tokens against a pooled reserve—and paste it into a block explorer to reveal what that trader buys and sells, how much, when, and how often they rebalance.^[2]

The project's first product, Shield Swap, opened to early access on August 18, 2025, an announcement Wu pinned to his profile and which the ShieldFi account posted the same day.^[2] Reporting week-one activity on August 29, the ShieldFi account gave a 24-hour trading volume of $511,708.25 and a total seven-day volume of $2,739,080.80.^[2] Wu marked the milestone on August 31 with a post stating, "First week of Shield Swap. Onwards!"^[2]

Cryptographic Contributions

Wu's research work centers on zero-knowledge proofs and elliptic-curve cryptography. His profile identifies him as a co-author of libsnark, a widely used C++ library for succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs; DIZK, a system for distributed zero-knowledge proof generation; and Zexe, a construction for decentralized private computation.^[2] He was a 2018 co-author of the Zexe paper on decentralized private computation, the design later implemented by Aleo.^[3]

According to Provable and to profiles describing his work, his contributions—particularly Zexe and DIZK—have been adopted by protocols including Ethereum, Zcash, and Aleo.^[5][1] These adoption claims are drawn from his own profiles and Provable's author page rather than independent assessment.^[4]