Nikhil Vanjani

Researcher

Mountain View, California, United States2 yrs 1 mo experience

Key Highlights

Expert in cryptography and blockchain technologies.
Developed techniques for functional encryption applications.
Industry experience with zero-knowledge proofs and BLS signatures.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Blockchain and Cryptography Specialist with a focus on security and decentralized systems.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Public Key CryptographyCryptographyZero-knowledge ProofsRust (programming Language)Smart Contracts

Other Skills

AlgorithmsAnalytical SkillsAssembly LanguageBashBlockchainCC (Programming Language)C++CircomCommunicationComputer ScienceCryptocurrencyData StructuresDigital SignaturesDistributed Systems

About

I am interested in cryptography and blockchains, and I aim to design expressive, efficient, and privacy-preserving systems that bridge the gap between provable security and real-world deployment. My work so far has focused on developing new techniques for functional encryption (FE) and exploring its applications to decentralized systems. While general-purpose FE remains inefficient, my work bridges theory and practice by (i) uncovering new applications of FE, (ii) advancing security and efficiency of FE for restricted function classes sufficient for its applications, and (iii) replacing FE with lighter primitives to meet real-world performance goals. I also have industry research experience working at 0xPARC Foundation and Algorand, working on implementing zero-knowledge proofs (Plonky2, Plonky3) and BLS signatures for blockchain applications.

Experience

Babylon labs

Senior Researcher

Jan 2026 – Present · 2 mos · Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site

Employer of Record: Workco International LLC

Ntt research

Research Intern

Jun 2025 – Aug 2025 · 2 mos · Sunnyvale, California, United States · On-site

Public Key CryptographyResearchC++Computer ScienceEncryptionCryptography+1

0xparc foundation

Research Engineer

Mar 2025 – May 2025 · 2 mos

Employer of Record: Deel

Zero-knowledge proofsRust (Programming Language)Presentation SkillsPerformance BenchmarkingCommunicationAnalytical Skills+3

Ntt research

Research Intern

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024 · 2 mos · Sunnyvale, California, United States · On-site

Public Key CryptographyEncryptionCryptographyResearchComputer Science

Algorand

Smart Contracts Researcher

May 2021 – Aug 2021 · 3 mos · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

CryptographySmart ContractsBlockchainRust (Programming Language)Digital Signatures

Carnegie mellon university's information networking institute

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Feb 2021 – May 2021 · 3 mos · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

14741: Intro to Information Security

Indian institute of technology, madras

Project Associate

Aug 2019 – Jun 2020 · 10 mos · Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Worked in Cryptography Group with Dr. Shweta Agrawal

Cohesity

Member Of Technical Staff

Jun 2018 – Jul 2019 · 1 yr 1 mo · Bengaluru Area, India

Lucideus

Intern

May 2017 – Jul 2017 · 2 mos · New Delhi Area, India

Studied CIS Benchmarks for RHEL7, Cisco Switches
Articulated security configuration controls for hardening of Servers (HP - UX), Switches (Juniper, HP,
3COM), Firewalls VPN (Fortigate), Databases (MySQL 5.6, MSSQL 2008, 2014, 2016) to support automation
of the company’s enterprise product
Calculated CCSS scores for various attack vectors

Indian institute of technology, kanpur

Intern

May 2016 – Jul 2016 · 2 mos · Kanpur Area, India

Worked for IIT Kanpur's New York Office:
Developed an online learning collaborative filtering algorithm based on matrix factorisation for movie recommendation
based on the users’ ratings on other movies
Trained the model on MovieLens 1M dataset and optimized parameters
Designed a model incorporating collaborative filtering to generate news feed