2026-04-10 –, Limmat (Y15-G-60)
Every new frontier in crypto — network societies, onchain governance, autonomous agents — runs into the same tension: privacy and verifiability. Legitimacy depends on both. A vote must be real without revealing who cast it. A credential must be valid without exposing the person behind it. Shared computation must be correct without any single party seeing the whole picture. The infrastructure is now catching up to the problem: ZK passport registries, proof-of-humanity, private shared state, programmable confidential execution. This panel brings together builders working across that stack to explore where privacy, identity, and verifiability converge — and what legitimate coordination actually requires as the ecosystem matures.
Aisling holds degrees in math, economics, and computer science, and obtained her PhD from the ENS in Paris in 2019. She has spent the past years working extensively on threshold cryptography and confidential computing, in both trad-fi and web3. Beyond this, she also worked on scientific and technical direction, strategy, and the legal aspects of building and using privacy tech.
Co-founder, Self Protocol.
Previously an Ethereum Foundation grantee at OpenPassport (co-founder).
Cybersecurity Master Student @ETHZ working on applied cryptography. Worked on ZKP combined with FHE (vFHE) at COMPSEC lab @EPFL. Currently exploring ZKP-based onchain identity systems.
I co-founded Aztec, and am currently Executive Director and board member of the Aztec Foundation. I created the Polaris Fellowship (now known on as Odyssey). I angel invest in ideological founders. I occasionally host essays on this site.
I'm most interested in talent, trust, privacy, and the future.
I'm also currently thinking about cryptography, the process of becoming, the history of technology, and the culture of technology.
Rachel-Rose O'Leary is a DarkFi core developer and writer. She authored 'Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle', a text which helped create a web3 privacy revival. She trained as an artist and is a a self-taught programmer.