Profile
Who is keeping this notebook
zorvan — a cryptography and confidential-computing engineer, and a relational thinker. Eighteen-plus years across cryptographic protocol design, confidential hardware execution, and systems architecture; lately, coordination systems and the philosophy underneath them. The handle is older than any title; I sign my essays a nomadic relationarch — someone who studies the relations that action leaves behind, and refuses to let them be erased.
This page is honest signal, not a pitch. If you work where cryptography meets coordination — or you think in relations — I'd like to build with you.
Interests
- Cryptography & security
- zero-knowledge (SNARKs/STARKs)MPC · SMPCFHEthreshold signaturesVSS · DKGconfidential computing (SGX/TDX)side-channel & hardware security
- Systems
- Rustdistributed systemsblockchain L1/L2client-side validationP2P
- Coordination & collective life
- coordination without surveillanceaccountabilitymechanism designshared memory
- Thought
- relational philosophycritical theorynon-axiomatic systemstheory of writing
- Art
- calligraphy3D typographynarrative & generative art
Ongoing
Infrastructure for an accountability economy — portable, verifiable proof that consequential actions were authorized.
accountability · client-side validationA coordination system for small groups — perception, not prediction; carrying memory forward without modelling users.
coordination · PythonEssays on delegated action and coordination, and an ongoing relational program — a relational logic and a mathematics of complexity matching.
essays · relational thoughtAn art practice around Persian calligraphy and 3D typography — writing in three dimensions, the in-between made visible.
calligraphy · 3D typographyCapabilities
- Cryptographic protocols
- ZKP (SNARKs / STARKs), SMPC, VSS, DKG, threshold signatures, FHE, indistinguishability obfuscation.
- Confidential computing
- Intel SGX / TDX, AMD SEV, GPU TEE, enclave networks, MPC key management, remote attestation.
- Blockchain architecture
- L1 / L2 design, Bitcoin · Ethereum · Solana · Aptos · Sui, Substrate, consensus work, DeFi primitives; 10k–50k TPS.
- Hardware & embedded
- SoC FPGA, TRNG design, finite-field arithmetic, ECC in assembly, TETRA / BTS DSP, hardware penetration testing.
- High-performance systems
- Distributed HPC (100+ nodes), Rust, C / C++, assembly, concurrent systems, secure deployment (K8s, Terraform, Ansible).
- Applied ML
- ZKML, confidential LLM inference, multivariate time-series, real-time IoT / sensor pipelines.
Selected work
- Fortress — a 13-layer blockchain security protocol spanning hardware, off-chain components, and cryptographic primitives.
- Ternoa SGX enclaves — a TEE enclave server (Intel SGX + Gramine) for the Secret-NFT protocol: remote attestation, P2P key sync, and on-chain key management. source
- Confidential order book — a matching engine that removes front-running, cutting information leakage ~90% versus public-mempool models.
- Enclave-sealed wallet — embedded a complete wallet codebase inside an Intel SGX enclave via low-level driver work.
- Distributed HPC cluster — architect of a 100+-node cluster for cryptographic computation; custom C++/MPI provisioning, scheduling, and health monitoring.
- ECC in silicon — key-agreement in assembly and hardware logic reaching sub-100ms on low-power embedded targets.
- TETRA stack — a full trunked-radio BTS stack and physical-layer DSP (π/4-DQPSK) on SoC FPGA and TI DSP platforms.
Public code — the Ternoa SGX enclaves, verifiable secret sharing, and simplicial-complex (topological knowledge discovery) — lives under Work.
Trajectory
- Senior Confidential-AI Engineer Zeroth Research 2026 —
ZKML, TEE + ZK proof-of-ownership and watermarking for confidential LLMs. - Lead Cryptographer & Blockchain Architect Whiterock-Fi 2025–26
Confidential order book; Hotstuff L1 at 20–50k TPS, sub-500ms finality; RWA tokenization. - Senior Cryptographer, Confidential Computing Fleek 2024–25
SGX-sealed wallet; Intel TDX confidential AI inference; confidential-DNS audit. - Senior Cryptographer, Confidential Computing Ternoa 2022–24
SGX NFT key management, >99.99% availability; MPC isolation; SNARK/STARK cost reduction. - Senior Cryptography Developer Mintlayer 2021–22
Programmable pools bringing DeFi to Bitcoin's UTXO model on Substrate; Rust RPC from first principles. - Co-Founder & CTO Xarv 2019 —
Blockchain confidential-document systems for national notary/forensic bodies; Hyperledger IoT supply chain. - Research Lead, Cryptography & Hardware Security Independent 2010–18
The distributed HPC cluster, Fortress, ECC-in-assembly, TETRA, and 30+ secure-embedded projects.
Formation
- M.Sc. Computer Science — Theory of Computation Tehran Polytechnic 2017
- M.Sc. Pure Mathematics Sharif University of Technology 2009
- B.Sc. Electronics Engineering Shahid Beheshti University 2004
Languages — English (professional), Persian (native), Arabic (intermediate), German & French (learning).
Relational critical engineering
I call the practice relational critical engineering. Engineering, because it has to compile and hold under adversaries. Critical, because a system is never only technical — it encodes who may act, who must prove, and who is left answerable. Relational, because the unit that matters is not the object but the bond between people that the object mediates. Everything above is in service of it.
Elsewhere
- Medium — /@zorvan
- GitHub — /zorvan
- Diewan — /diewan
- LinkedIn — /in/xorvan
- Instagram — /@sarvesadi
- Correspondence — best reached through LinkedIn.
How this notebook is made
Built with Eleventy, hand-set in a native serif stack — no web fonts, no external requests, no trackers. Essays are pulled from the Medium feed at build time; the work list and this page are plain data. The whole thing is a few kilobytes of HTML over a warm sheet of CSS. Source lives at github.com/zorvan/zorvan.github.io.
Every deploy stamps a short fingerprint in the footer — a small habit borrowed from the subject matter. Authority stated, action proven.
The previous decade of this site — a Jekyll weblog called Narrative Consciousness — rests in the archive.