Maintainers

Election of Maintainers#

The election of Maintainers, the launch of the DIP program, and an associated call for contributors reinforce the Diem Association’s commitment to transparency in the Diem project’s governance.

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) has approved updates to the TSC framework which separate out the roles of Maintainer and Production Maintainer. The new category of Production Maintainer embodies the contributions that collectively guide the technical direction for developer infrastructure, testing, deployment and main-net operations, recognizing the momentous and unique effort in making the Diem Payment Network secure, reliable and performant in production. With the introduction of this new category, Diem has three Maintainer categories: Vanilla-, Production-, and Committer- Maintainer.

Meet the Maintainers#

The Diem Association Technical Steering Committee has elected the following people into those respective roles.

Andrew Baine (Bison Trails) as a Production Maintainer
George Danezis (Novi) as a Maintainer
Michael Gorven (Facebook) as a Production Maintainer
Young Yang Liauw (Novi) as a Production Maintainer
Daniel Prinz (First Group) as a Maintainer
Sherry Xiao (Facebook) as a Production Maintainer

Andrew Baine \ Andrew Baine is a Manager at Bison Trails on the Protocols team. He leads the team responsible for launching, operating and upgrading nodes on Tendermint, HotStuff, Algorand, Bitcoin, and related networks. He is the lead developer and architect for Bison Trails Diem Validator clusters. Andrew has been at Bison Trails for two years and, along with the other early engineers at Bison Trails, designed and implemented the go-to-market version of Bison Trails' cluster management platform.

Andrew has been a member of the Board of Directors of LedgerX, LLC, since April, 2018, and ran a cryptocurrency hedge fund for two years prior to joining Bison Trails in 2019. Before strapping onto the cryptocurrency rocket, Andrew was a Software Engineer and Engineering Manager at AWS, and a Software Engineer at Google Scholar. He has an MS in Computer Science, a JD, and an undergraduate degree in Economics.

Email: andrew@bisontrails.co

George Danezis \ George Danezis is a Research Scientist on the Blockchain team at Facebook and Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science of University College London.

He has been working on anonymous communications, privacy enhancing technologies (PET), traffic analysis and peer-to-peer systems since 2000. He has previously been a Researcher for Microsoft Research, Cambridge; a visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium); and a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he also completed his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. R.J. Anderson.

His theoretical contributions to the Privacy Technologies field include the established information theoretic and other probabilistic metrics for anonymity and pioneering the study of statistical attacks against anonymity systems. On the practical side he is one of the lead designers of the anonymous mail system Mixminion, as well as Minx, Sphinx, Drac, Hornet and Loopix; he has worked on the traffic analysis of deployed protocols such as Tor.

His current research interests focus around secure communications, high-integirty systems to support privacy, smart grid privacy, peer-to-peer and social network security, as well as the application of machine learning techniques to security problems. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers on these topics in international conferences and journals.

He was the co-program chair of ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference in 2011 and 2012, IFCA Financial Cryptography and Data Security in 2011, the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop in 2005 and 2006. He sits on the PET Symposium board and previously the ACM CCS Steering committee and he regularly serves in program committees of leading conferences in the field of privacy and security. He is a fellow of the British Computing Society since 2014.

He co-founded in 2018 the Chainspace.io start-up engineering scalable smart-contract platform, before his team moved to Facebook in 2019; and acts as an advisor to numerous technology start-ups in security and blockchains.

Email: gdanezis@fb.com

Michael Gorven \ Michael Gorven joined Facebook as a Production Engineer in 2013, initially helping Instagram scale to 500M users. He then worked on the Web Foundation team improving the reliability of Facebook's webserver tier, before joining the Libra/Diem project in 2019. There he built the testnet deployments, production validator deployments on three clouds, and helped bring Diem to its Mainnet launch. Before Facebook he was an early employee at South African startup Nimbula. Michael grew up in Durban, South Africa and holds a BSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Cape Town. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.

Email: mgorven@fb.com

Young Yang Liauw \ Young is the Novi technical lead in Developer Infrastructure; the areas include software development life cycle, developer experience and Diem Ecosystem integration. Previously he has been technical lead and engineering manager across compiler and release engineering teams at Facebook. He is a former researcher at Stanford University where he co-led a DARPA-funded project in nonvolatile reconfigurable computing. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Email: youngyl@fb.com

Daniel Prinz \ Daniel is the CTO of First Digital Assets Group, where he leads teams that build Blockchain tools and APIs for developers using Diem, and a payment platform for merchants to accept Diem. Previously, Daniel was the CTO of the Cyber Division in the Israeli Secret Service, Software Architect at SAP and Applied Materials. He has a BSc from Bar-Ilan University in computer science.

Email: daniel@firstdag.com

Sherry Xiao \ Sherry Xiao is a Production Engineer at Novi team and has been leading the production readiness effort for Diem Blockchain across several areas such as observability, debuggability, disaster recovery readiness and incident response procedure. Previously, she has been the technical lead for Instagram's "Infrastructure as a Service" initiative; and worked on scaling the Instagram web server fleet and Cassandra clusters.

Email: sherryxiao@fb.com