Sergey is CEO of Interop Labs, co-founder of Axelar, and an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo. He is interested in constructing cryptographic primitives, protocols, and systems that enable novel applications in untrusted and distributed settings. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a Microsoft Ph.D. fellow, and he earned his MSc and BSc from UToronto. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on creating cryptographic tools for the cloud using lattice-based cryptography, for which he was awarded the Sprowls Doctoral Thesis Award for the best thesis in CS at MIT. He was part of the founding team of Algorand, where he was involved in various business and technical aspects of the company, and he headed the cryptography group. Additionally, he spent some time at IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre.