Valeria
Nikolaenko
Research Partner
Valeria Nikolaenko is a Research Partner at a16z crypto, where she advises portfolio companies on research endeavors. Additionally, she works on research projects that focus on cryptography and blockchain security for the benefit of the web3 community. She has worked on topics such as long-range attacks in PoS consensus protocols, signature schemes, post-quantum security, and multi-party computation.
Prior to joining a16z crypto, Valeria was a Research Scientist at the Diem blockchain. Before that she completed her PhD in Cryptography at Stanford University under advisorship of Professor Dan Boneh, and did a cycling expedition crossing the South America continent.
Valeria enjoys sailing, bike-touring, and cross-country skiing.
Representative works include:
- “Powers-of-Tau to the People: Decentralizing Setup Ceremonies” (with Sam Ragsdale, Joseph Bonneau, and Dan Boneh)
- “Non-Interactive Half-Aggregation of EdDSA and Variants of Schnorr Signatures” (with Konstantinos Chalkias, François Garillot, and Yashvanth Kondi)
- “Taming the many EdDSAs” (with Konstantinos Chalkias and François Garillot)
- “Winkle: Foiling Long-Range Attacks in Proof-of-Stake Systems” (with Sarah Azouvi and George Danezis)
- “Frodo: Take off the ring! Practical, Quantum-Secure Key Exchange from LWE” (with Joppe Bos, Craig Costello, Léo Ducas, Ilya Mironov, Michael Naehrig, Ananth Raghunathan, and Douglas Stebila)
- “Privacy-Preserving Ridge Regression on Hundreds of Millions of Records” (with Udi Weinsberg, Stratis Ioannidis, Marc Joye, Dan Boneh, and Nina Taft)