Meet the Dusk Network team
This page was last updated: 04-June-2020.
Jelle Pol
Business Lead
Jelle Pol is in charge of business at Dusk. He started his career at the aPaaS platform Mendix, which was recently acquired by Siemens. After experiencing what it is like to work for a scale up, he went on to play a key role in the Technical Innovation department at Shell, where he founded the blockchain team. During his time in the blockchain team the first three blockchain projects were started and Shell joined the EWF and Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. He finished his career at Shell in Renewable Energies, before venturing out to start his own ventures in the blockchain space. He is considered all rounded, meaning deep knowledge of both the technical development, the company structure and fundraising.
Fulvio Venturelli
Lead Devops
Fulvio Venturelli (Amazon, Excite, TomTom) is a software engineer at heart. Specializes in project management, software architecture and infrastructure. Together with Emanuele, he published four patents in the realm of IoT, sensor networking, positioning system and blockchain.
Mels Dees
Marketing Lead
Mels Dees graduated Cum Laude in Business Economics. Specializes and actively researches blockchain uses case and is an experienced digital growth strategist. His corporate experience stems from the financial industry where he performed classification and measurement on a near thousand of financial contracts and architected financial disclosures. Prior to starting Dusk he founded a blockchain consultancy where he build go-to-market strategies for newly funded companies. Former RaboBank.
Pascal Putman
Commercial Lead
Pascal Putman (ABN Amro, PostNL) specializes in New Business Development and IT advisory. After finishing the PostNL Talent Programme, he founded a consulting start-up in the blockchain space where he helped newly funded companies to build a go-to-market strategy. As a hands on consultant and manager in his former companies, he has vast expertise in creating entire infrastructures as well as pushing new IT products to market.
Dmitry Khovratovich
Lead Cryptographer
Dmitry Khovratovich got his PhD from University of Luxumbourg in 2010. He is the author of the Equihash (Zcash’s hashing algorithm) and MTP proof-of-works, the designer of the Argon2 password hash function, the author of the first attacks on the full AES block cipher. He is a recipient of two IACR Best Paper Awards, and his papers account for >2500 citations.
Robin Massini
Marketing & Strategy Expert
Robin started his career as a financial management trainee at the publicly traded Dutch Logistics Firm PostNL. With Masters in both Business Strategy & Finance he worked his way into several important projects and became a valued member of PostNL’s marketing management team that advises on strategic directions. Later he founded his own blockchain consultancy firm, Robin has had a direct impact on the sustainable growth of several DLT companies in the last year.
Sabine de Witte
PR Comms and Spokesperson
With 11 years under her belt, Sabine joins Dusk Network as a PR-executive and Spokesperson. Having worked for a wide variety of clients and projects as a freelance journalist, pr-executive and consultant, she is an experienced marketeer. Her interest in new technologies plainly shows in her FinTech and Blockchain track record. Prior to Dusk Network, she was part of a Berlin based startup that creates self-sovereign identity (SSI), organised the Dutch Premiere of the StartPage movie where Snowden made a video appearance, mentored at Rockstart: the Amsterdam based startup accelerator, and worked as a scout for Venture Capital investors.
Kevaundray Wedderburn
Blockchain Engineer
Kevaundray Wedderburn is an expert on bulletproofs. At Dusk he is creating a novel zero-knowledge proof protocol that enables to integrate circuits for Merkle Tree path proofs, set inclusion proofs, hash pre-image proofs and more. Former Neo research and City of Zion.
Victor Lopez
System Developer
Victor Lopez contributes to the Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine. Rust evangelist, speaker at RustRush. Actively participated in projects like Ethereum, where he did research and experimentation on the Ethereum 2.0 lighthouse implementation. Former TOTVS, Ortobom and National Platform where he implemented several large scale distributed financial systems.
Kristoffer Ström
VM Engineer
At Dusk Network, Kristoffer Ström is developing the Web Assembly/Rust zero-knowledge proof VM for smart contracts. Prior to Dusk he worked for InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) where he was in charge of developing the electron client and IPFS geo-ip. At Parity Ethereum he fixed bugs and worked on an experimental database backend.
Carlos Perez Baro
Blockchain Developer
Carlos Perez Baro is the co-creator of ZeroCaf, a doppio Elliptic Curve using a Ristretto mapping, by Dusk Network. Prior to Dusk he contributed to open-source projects such as Rust Web3 and ERC725, for which he was also an administrator. He thought scholars of UPC about Ethereum's Virtual Machine and was part of ALASTRIA, a blockchain project and regulated national effort by 70 of the largest companies in Spain. Former Rust Core Dev at Caelum Labs, Full Stack Dev at Atos.
Thomas Modeneis
Core Developer
Thomas is a developer advocate and blockchain core developer. An IT professional with over 15 years of experience in software development, who started exploring the world of cryptography in 2013. In addition, Thomas is a longstanding Java Community Process (JCP)member and Executive Committee Member with SouJava, that holds over 40.000 members. He is a regular keynote speaker at conferences such as JavaOne, GopherCon, JustJava, Campus Party, Blockchance, and more recently, at HardFork Summit Amsterdam.
Luke Pearson
Cryptographer
Luke Pearson is a skilled mathematician who is the co-creator of ZeroCaf, a doppio Elliptic Curve using a Ristretto mapping, by Dusk Network. Furthermore, he specializes in cryptographic protocols, and hash functions. At just 16 years of age his love for cryptography was tested and he was awarded finalist in the 'national cipher challenge'. Multi-linguist (English, French, German, Dutch, Russian).
Stijn Lucieer
Business Controller
Recently, Stijn graduated from the Erasmus University by defending his thesis on Accounting Conservatism. In his thesis he concluded that the longer a company is listed, the more conservative and repetitive its financial bookkeeping becomes. Which is why instead of opting for an accounting career at a large consultancy boutique he chose a more challenging accounting environment here at Dusk Network. As a business controller, Stijn is in charge of our financial reports and challenges the teams on their projects.
Emanuele Francioni
Project & Tech Lead
Inventor of the Dusk Network blockchain and the Segregated Byzantine Agreement consensus mechanism. Author of the Dusk Network whitepaper. Emanuele Francioni (Tomtom, Commerzbank and Vitrociset) has 20 years in R&D, tech leadership and software development on Byzantine Fault Tolerance systems, distributed computing, sensor networks and cryptography. Together with Fulvio, he published four patents in the realm of IoT, sensor networking, positioning system and blockchain.
Fulvio Venturelli
Lead Devops
Fulvio Venturelli (Amazon, Excite, TomTom) is a software engineer at heart. Specializes in project management, software architecture and infrastructure. Together with Emanuele, he published four patents in the realm of IoT, sensor networking, positioning system and blockchain.
Dmitry Khovratovich
Lead Cryptographer
Dmitry Khovratovich got his PhD from University of Luxumbourg in 2010. He is the author of the Equihash (Zcash’s hashing algorithm) and MTP proof-of-works, the designer of the Argon2 password hash function, the author of the first attacks on the full AES block cipher. He is a recipient of two IACR Best Paper Awards, and his papers account for >2500 citations.
Kevaundray Wedderburn
Blockchain Engineer
Kevaundray Wedderburn is an expert on bulletproofs. At Dusk he is creating a novel zero-knowledge proof protocol that enables to integrate circuits for Merkle Tree path proofs, set inclusion proofs, hash pre-image proofs and more. Former Neo research and City of Zion.
Victor Lopez
System Developer
Victor Lopez contributes to the Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine. Rust evangelist, speaker at RustRush. Actively participated in projects like Ethereum, where he did research and experimentation on the Ethereum 2.0 lighthouse implementation. Former TOTVS, Ortobom and National Platform where he implemented several large scale distributed financial systems.
Kristoffer Ström
VM Engineer
At Dusk Network, Kristoffer Ström is developing the Web Assembly/Rust zero-knowledge proof VM for smart contracts. Prior to Dusk he worked for InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) where he was in charge of developing the electron client and IPFS geo-ip. At Parity Ethereum he fixed bugs and worked on an experimental database backend.
Carlos Perez Baro
Blockchain Developer
Carlos Perez Baro is the co-creator of ZeroCaf, a doppio Elliptic Curve using a Ristretto mapping, by Dusk Network. Prior to Dusk he contributed to open-source projects such as Rust Web3 and ERC725, for which he was also an administrator. He thought scholars of UPC about Ethereum's Virtual Machine and was part of ALASTRIA, a blockchain project and regulated national effort by 70 of the largest companies in Spain. Former Rust Core Dev at Caelum Labs, Full Stack Dev at Atos.
Thomas Modeneis
Core Developer
Thomas is a developer advocate and blockchain core developer. An IT professional with over 15 years of experience in software development, who started exploring the world of cryptography in 2013. In addition, Thomas is a longstanding Java Community Process (JCP)member and Executive Committee Member with SouJava, that holds over 40.000 members. He is a regular keynote speaker at conferences such as JavaOne, GopherCon, JustJava, Campus Party, Blockchance, and more recently, at HardFork Summit Amsterdam.
Luke Pearson
Cryptographer
Luke Pearson is a skilled mathematician who is the co-creator of ZeroCaf, a doppio Elliptic Curve using a Ristretto mapping, by Dusk Network. Furthermore, he specializes in cryptographic protocols, and hash functions. At just 16 years of age his love for cryptography was tested and he was awarded finalist in the 'national cipher challenge'. Multi-linguist (English, French, German, Dutch, Russian).
Jelle Pol
Business Lead
Jelle Pol is in charge of business at Dusk. He started his career at the aPaaS platform Mendix, which was recently acquired by Siemens. After experiencing what it is like to work for a scale up, he went on to play a key role in the Technical Innovation department at Shell, where he founded the blockchain team. During his time in the blockchain team the first three blockchain projects were started and Shell joined the EWF and Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. He finished his career at Shell in Renewable Energies, before venturing out to start his own ventures in the blockchain space. He is considered all rounded, meaning deep knowledge of both the technical development, the company structure and fundraising.
Mels Dees
Marketing Lead
Mels Dees graduated Cum Laude in Business Economics. Specializes and actively researches blockchain uses case and is an experienced digital growth strategist. His corporate experience stems from the financial industry where he performed classification and measurement on a near thousand of financial contracts and architected financial disclosures. Prior to starting Dusk he founded a blockchain consultancy where he build go-to-market strategies for newly funded companies. Former RaboBank.
Pascal Putman
Commercial Lead
Pascal Putman (ABN Amro, PostNL) specializes in New Business Development and IT advisory. After finishing the PostNL Talent Programme, he founded a consulting start-up in the blockchain space where he helped newly funded companies to build a go-to-market strategy. As a hands on consultant and manager in his former companies, he has vast expertise in creating entire infrastructures as well as pushing new IT products to market.
Robin Massini
Marketing & Strategy Expert
Robin started his career as a financial management trainee at the publicly traded Dutch Logistics Firm PostNL. With Masters in both Business Strategy & Finance he worked his way into several important projects and became a valued member of PostNL’s marketing management team that advises on strategic directions. Later he founded his own blockchain consultancy firm, Robin has had a direct impact on the sustainable growth of several DLT companies in the last year.
Sabine de Witte
PR Comms and Spokesperson
With 11 years under her belt, Sabine joins Dusk Network as a PR-executive and Spokesperson. Having worked for a wide variety of clients and projects as a freelance journalist, pr-executive and consultant, she is an experienced marketeer. Her interest in new technologies plainly shows in her FinTech and Blockchain track record. Prior to Dusk Network, she was part of a Berlin based startup that creates self-sovereign identity (SSI), organised the Dutch Premiere of the StartPage movie where Snowden made a video appearance, mentored at Rockstart: the Amsterdam based startup accelerator, and worked as a scout for Venture Capital investors.
Stijn Lucieer
Business Controller
Recently, Stijn graduated from the Erasmus University by defending his thesis on Accounting Conservatism. In his thesis he concluded that the longer a company is listed, the more conservative and repetitive its financial bookkeeping becomes. Which is why instead of opting for an accounting career at a large consultancy boutique he chose a more challenging accounting environment here at Dusk Network. As a business controller, Stijn is in charge of our financial reports and challenges the teams on their projects.
Inventor of the Dusk Network blockchain and the Segregated Byzantine Agreement consensus mechanism. Author of the Dusk Network whitepaper. Emanuele Francioni (Tomtom, Commerzbank and Vitrociset) has 20 years in R&D, tech leadership and software development on Byzantine Fault Tolerance systems, distributed computing, sensor networks and cryptography. Together with Fulvio, he published four patents in the realm of IoT, sensor networking, positioning system and blockchain.