Hej!

You are at the personal webpage of Alexander Shevtsov.

Bio

Academic and education

I’m quite curious and have interest in many things, ranging from linguistics and cryptography to quantum physics and cosmology. Still, most of the time in academia I’ve spent with mathematics and computer science.

Graduated from the Belarusian State University with specialist degree thesis: the density of Cartan subalgebras in the variety of abelian subalgebras of complex semisimple Lie algebras. Then I’ve spent a year on master’s programme in mathematics at HSE faculty of mathematics with term paper topic: structure of the automorphism group of a finite-dimensional associative algebra.

In 2022 I’’ve finished Master’s in Mathematical Logic and Foundations of Computer Science at University of Paris. Master’s paper is about algorithmic randomness (supervised by Alexander Shen).

My mathematical background comes with usual fields like topology, algebra and analysis, some differential and algebraic topology,
Lie theory
, category theory, theoretical computer science, logic, model theory, cryptography, Kolmogorov complexity, type theory, classical physics as well as a bit of
relativity and quantum physics
and computational mathematics.

I’ve also took few courses at Independent University of Moscow and follow some mathematical and natural science courses from Collège de France.

However, the more I know, the more I understand how distant I am from being at the cutting edge, so I would hardly call myself a professional in any of the above fields.

Business

Most of the time I’ve worked as an individual, because the balance of interest/compensation/freedom usually shifted against me, however theoretically it’s not a rule.

A long time ago I was a freelancer, doing some web development, maintaining cryptographic gem, doing proof-of-concept creations, tutoring general topology, and even
writing educational articles about cryptography.

With some background in mathematics and cryptography, it seemed quite straightforward to try myself in the newly emerging blockchain sphere.

In 2017 I was the
CEO of an ICO
startup (though, in the end it was a fail),
the jack of all trades:
writing the whitepaper, creating smart contracts, pitching the project at conferences (d10e conference in Seoul), organising the workflow, hiring and firing people, dealing with customers, managing nodes and servers.

During this time, I was also a technical consultant/architect in a research/working group for another blockchain project.

In 2019 I worked as a blockchain developer at dexpa.io, porting Ethereum smart contracts to the TON blockchain, also testing and debuging the SDKs from TONlabs.

Later, 2019-2020 security analyst at FutureComes, making security audits for web and crypto projects (wallets, exchanges and exchange services).

I’ve been involved in the Handshake project, with tiny contributions to the node and the protocol. I've built a web wallet for it, and also (not solely) built a public block explorer: hnsnetwork.com.

Since 2021 I was mostly doing Ethereum-related development. For example we've launched speculative NFT projects: Exponentials, Logarithms. Besides that, I mined gems on GPU; wrote code to participate in overhyped onchain sales (when MEV had not yet been a thing); mimicked human interaction for web platforms.

In 2023 wrote API for hardware wallet; took part in hackathons (example) and tried my best with some open cryptography problems, however with no results.

In 2024 implemented stateless DANE TLS scheme for Handshake: repository, its short presentation. Now (autumn 2024) working for Spaces protocol.

I'm open to interesting proposals!

Boring stuff

CV

Also

  1. Algorithmic randomness
  2. Educational cryptography articles
  3. Small mathematics course for people, who don't know anything about it (Russian).

Contacts

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Current location: Paris, France.

Key

My key for private communication.