About
Astarisc is the cryptographic research and engineering practice of Dr. Alan Szepieniec. While Astarisc operates as a specialized one-man laboratory, it maintains a global network of trusted experts in formal verification, hardware acceleration, and decentralized systems to scale for larger engagements when required.
Dr. Alan Szepieniec
Alan is a cryptographer and engineer whose work focuses on the intersection of post-quantum security and advanced proof systems. His career has been defined by a "theory-to-commit" philosophy: moving from mathematical breakthroughs to production-grade implementations.
Academic Trajectory & Research Foundations
Alan earned his PhD in Cryptography from the COSIC research group at KU Leuven, one of the world's leading laboratories for electronic identity and data security.
His doctoral research was rooted in Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), where he explored the construction of multivariate quadratic (MQ) cryptosystems and the soundness of security proofs in the presence of quantum adversaries, developed new alternative hard problems suitable for post-quantum public key cryptography.
Following his doctorate, Alan pivoted toward the design of symmetric primitives engineered for modern proof systems. By leveraging his expertise in Gröbner bases and commutative algebra—tools originally utilized to analyze the hardness of MQ systems—he co-developed the Marvellous design strategy. This work provided the foundational logic for a new generation of arithmetization-oriented hashes and ciphers.
Professional Trajectory & Research Engagements
Following his PhD and prior to founding Neptune Cash, Alan spent several years as a specialized researcher and consultant within the blockchain ecosystem. During his tenure at the Nervos Foundation, he co-authored the DARK/Supersonic paper. This work was a significant theoretical milestone, as it introduced the first SNARK without trusted setup and established the modular architecture—separating the information-theoretic Polynomial IOP from the cryptographic polynomial commitment scheme—that has since become the standard paradigm for modern SNARK design.
Throughout this period, Alan also conducted targeted cryptographic research for other blockchain projects such as Ethereum Foundation and Polygon. These engagements focused on the frontiers of arithmetization-oriented symmetric cryptography, including the design of ZK-friendly hash functions and the rigorous cryptanalysis of their resistance against advanced algebraic attacks.
Current Engineering & Project Leadership
Neptune Cash & Triton VM: Architecting the Future State
Alan’s work as the co-founder and chief architect of Neptune Cash serves as the primary realization of his "theory-to-commit" philosophy. Neptune Cash holds the distinction of being the first Layer-1 protocol to integrate zk-STARKs as native citizens recognized directly by the consensus mechanism.
Long before the industry consolidated around similar goals, Alan architected Neptune Cash to solve the fundamental trilemma of Privacy, Scalability, and Post-Quantum Security:
- Privacy: Enabling anonymous, untraceable transactions.
- Scalability: Leveraging the succinctness of STARKs, recursive proofs, and aggregation to achieve high throughput while ensuring the chain remains light enough for mobile-class devices to verify state.
- Post-Quantum Security: Relying exclusively on hash functions to ensure long-term resilience against quantum adversaries.
The engine powering this ecosystem is the Triton VM, which Alan is a core contributor to. Triton VM is a Turing-complete virtual machine with a built-in STARK engine, designed specifically to translate the complex constraints arising from Neptune Cash into provable (and verifiable) computational claims. It serves as the execution environment for Neptune Cash's private smart contracts, enabling "programmable privacy" where the witness for a computation remains hidden even as its correctness is proven to the network.