I am a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Radius, where we are building financial infrastructure for the AI economy. Radius is a payment network that operates at internet scale — a smart contract platform that processes millions of parallel transactions per second, settles payments in under a second, and executes thousands of transactions for a dollar. Radius is EVM-compatible — existing tools and wallets work as-is. Our team brings decades of experience building cryptographic systems, digital currency, and high-assurance financial infrastructure.
I co-invented Zerocash and co-founded Zcash. Both relied on libsnark, the efficient C++ library for zero-knowledge proofs, that I co-authored. Cryptographic techniques from our research now underpin core standards in Ethereum and secure billions of dollars in digital assets. Zerocash received the IEEE Test of Time Award at the 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, recognizing work that has had “a broad and lasting impact on both research and practice in computer security and privacy.”
At MIT, I was a Research Scientist at the Media Lab where I was part of the Digital Currency Initiative. At DCI I built high-performance payment systems and privacy-enhancing technologies for digital currencies.
At the Media Lab I was also part of Joi Ito’s research group. I am proud of our work with Joi on cryptocurrencies and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, where I was fortunate to be advised by the incomparable Ron Rivest. My Ph.D. thesis, also on libsnark, won the George M. Sprowls Award for Best MIT Ph.D. Thesis in Computer Science. Before coming to MIT I did my undergraduate work at the University of Latvia under the excellent guidance of Andris Ambainis.
The best way to reach me is: madars@mit.edu. ■