About Me and why am I mentoring
Hi my name is Mikerah mostly known as @badcryptobitch on Twitter. I run HashCloak, a small consulting firm focused on the areas of privacy and distributed systems mainly as they pertain to blockchains.
Previously, I worked at ChainSafe on Eth2.0 and other research stuff and before then I was a research assistant at the University of Toronto, pretty much working on the same topics.
Training Won’t be for a protocol
As we are a consulting company, we don’t work on any specific protocols. Further, as this is a research position, you will be given a lot of freedom on what to work on as long as it pertains to privacy enhancing technologies.
Number of trainees: 1
Training Will target a job position
The ideal outcome for this mentorship position is that you come work at HashCloak as a privacy researcher. You’ll be working with our research engineers and other researchers to help clients with their problems and help on our internal projects as well.
Target position will be remote
Minimum requirements for trainee candidates
An ideal candidate would be a beginning grad student with coding skills looking to get their toes wet in industry research.
Someone who wants their graduate research to be used in practice instead of just being stuck as papers.
Mentoring hours per week
There will be 1-2 hours for a call each week and then mostly async communication for most of the week. If more hours are needed for a call, we will schedule that as needed.
Work hours per week expected
We expect at least 5 hours of work per week and no more than 20 hours of work.
Duration of the program
We are looking at 3 months for the duration of the program.
Trainee contribution expected during the training program
The expected outcome at the end of the program is a paper that will be posted on a site like eprint or arxiv.
Throughout the duration of the program, you will write blog posts around the topics that you research.
By the end of it, your paper should be on a topic that is relevant to privacy and cryptography. Due to the duration of the program, we expect the paper to be some sort of survey or SoK but can also be a short paper on an informally defined concept used colloquially in the space defined more formally (e.g. see Zamyatin’s paper on velvet forks for an example of this kind of paper).
Salary Range
The mentee will be compensated during the course of the program. We will pay competitively.
Protocol equity position
n/a