Rafael Belchior
Project Maintainer at LF Decentralized Trust
Portugal
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRafael Belchior is a Research Engineer and Senior Software Engineer with a PhD in Blockchain and over a decade of experience building secure, distributed systems from research prototypes to production. Based in Portugal, he combines academic rigor (IST, MIT visiting researcher via a Fulbright) with hands-on engineering at organizations like LF Decentralized Trust and Blockdaemon. He maintains and contributes to prominent open-source projects such as Hyperledger Cacti, where he improved Fabric private-data support and test infrastructure for multiple ledgers, reflecting deep interoperability expertise. Rafael has a strong R&D pedigree—postdoc and doctoral work at INESC‑ID, teaching experience as an invited assistant professor, and a track record mentoring R&D teams. He blends backend and DevOps skills to ship reliable, auditable systems and often bridges the gap between formal research and practical blockchain deployments. A less obvious strength is his repeated role as a connector: coordinating documentation, tooling, and testing across complex multi-ledger ecosystems to accelerate adoption.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Visiting Researcher Computer Science, Visiting Researcher Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyComputer Science and Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering at Warsaw University of TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Blockchain, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Blockchain at Instituto Superior Técnico
English, Spanish, Portuguese
Github Skills (7)
fabric10
test-automation10
dockers9
docker9
go8
substrate8
hyperledger-besu7
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
hyperledger-cacti/cacti
Mar 2020 - Aug 2022
Hyperledger Cacti is a new approach to the blockchain interoperability problem
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:265 reviews, 20 commits, 149 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Rafael Belchior's contributions focused on enhancing the Hyperledger Cacti project. He added support for Fabric connector with private data features, improving the interoperability capabilities. Furthermore, he worked on the test tooling for the Substrate test ledger, and improved the test infrastructure related to Besu. Additionally, he updated and fixed the code for the documentation.
blockchainhyperledger
ietf-satp/draft-ietf-satp-core
Oct 2023 - Jul 2026
SATP Core Draft official repository
Contributions:6 reviews, 7 PRs, 69 pushes in 2 years 8 months
ietfinternet-draft
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