Paul Etscheit
Founder CTO at Bankai
Berlin, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Etscheit is a protocol engineer and founder based in Berlin with a decade of software experience focused on zero-knowledge infrastructure and applied cryptography. He builds recursive, stateless ZK light clients and has spun research into product at Bankai after prototyping the approach at Herodotus, where he implemented Cairo-based RLP decoding, MPT/MMR verification, and custom Cairo–Rust syscalls for trustless Ethereum state access. Paul has hands-on cryptography experience—BLS, hash-to-curve, SHA-256 padding—and practical expertise designing proof aggregation and recursion schemes for efficient on-chain verification. Earlier work includes Substrate development at t3rn (Ethereum PoS sync-committee light client and cross-chain executor tooling) and contributions to the ZoKrates zkSNARK toolbox, notably adding ABIv2 and CLI proof-formatting features. He pairs academic rigor from TU Berlin research with startup pragmatism, having founded two ventures and shipped production Rust and Cairo tooling. An uncommon strength is his ability to bridge low-level Ethereum internals, proof-system research, and deployable engineering for minimal-cost on-chain verification.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Nanodegree, Deep Learning Foundations, Nanodegree, Deep Learning Foundations at UdacityBachelor of Science (BSc), Wirtschaftsinformatik, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Wirtschaftsinformatik at Technische Universität BerlinJunior Full Stack Developer, Full Stack Developer, Junior Full Stack Developer, Full Stack Developer at Dev BootcampAbitur, Abitur, Abitur, Abitur at Nelson Mandela School Berlin
German, English, French
Stackoverflow
503reputation
134kreached
2answers
16questions
Github Skills (19)
solidity10
command-line-interface10
zksnark10
command-line10
rust10
cli10
ethereum9
apidoc8
api8
json8
angular-material6
angular6
nodejs6
typescript6
java6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
Zokrates/ZoKrates
Apr 2019 - Jan 2021
A toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:43 commits, 47 PRs, 22 comments in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on enhancing the ZoKrates codebase. They added functionality related to the testing pipeline, including adding arguments for contract calls. The user introduced new commands to the command-line interface (CLI) for printing proofs in various formats. A significant contribution was the implementation of ABIv2 in both the CLI and core components, specifically modifying the Solidity verifier.
ethereumzksnarkszero-knowledgesnarkverifiable-computation
petscheit/garaga
Oct 2023 - Nov 2025
Efficient pairing library, written in Cairo 🐺.
Contributions:16 PRs, 46 pushes, 12 branches in 2 years 1 month
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