Web3 Leader Spotlight: Rahul Saxena
This week, we had the opportunity to catch up with Rahul Saxena, Protocol Security Engineer at zkSync, a Layer-2 protocol designed to scale Ethereum using advanced ZK technology. Their mission goes beyond just boosting Ethereum's throughput; they aim to preserve it's core values – freedom, self-sovereignty, and decentralization – at scale.
With a passion for tackling challenges associated with Smart Contracts, ZK Circuits, and Rust bugs, Rahul's focus is on ensuring the development of efficient solutions and sharing helpful knowledge with his Web3 audience.
Follow Rahul on X at @saxenism.
Can you share your journey into Web3 and how you became a Protocol Security Engineer at zkSync?
I first got into crypto in March of 2021, while I was in the final year of my Computer Science engineering degree, when Ethereum India announced the Ethereum India Fellowship. I got into the fellowship with the aim of collecting $1000 and getting out. However, once I started meeting representatives from leading protocols such as Nexus Mutual, Polygon, Aave, Superfluid, etc it dawned on me that these things actually make a lot of sense and people here are building a parallel financial vehicles.
When the fellowship was over, I kept participating in hackathons alongside my conventional job and gained confidence in my skills. I later joined sublime finance as a blockchain engineer with a focus on testing the codebase for 13 months. Following this, I transitioned to working as an independent security and testing consultant. My clientele included Sablier, Brahma Finance, Specular L2, Inverter Network to name a few.
Having worked as an independent contractor for about 15 months, I sensed a desire to focus my efforts in a way that could contribute meaningfully to the wider web3 landscape. This led me to joining zkSync.
How is zkSync making digital self-ownership more widely available and fostering adoption?
Since zkSync is a Type4 ZkEVM it has a massive scope for introducing some of the technical advancements in the Ethereum ecosystem, natively. For example, people have recently started rallying around account abstraction (AA) on-chain and have come up with a standard and various implementations but zkSync on the other hand has implemented AA natively in the Virtual Machine itself.
zkSync has a LOT of failsafe mechanisms built-in to protect it’s users from black swan events. The most beautiful thing about zkSync is that it has one of the best people in the world working on the hardest possible challenges and yet we are the ones who are the most paranoid about our codebases. That’s a W in my books.
What role do you believe zkSync will play in shaping the future of blockchain technology?
In the future, ideally, Ethereum would simply be a proof-aggregation layer with the exception of some really really high volume transactions where the involved parties want to have zero trust assumptions such as World Bank giving out loans to multiple countries etc.
When that happens, the entire on-chain financial activities would be happening on the L2s like zkSync. Since that is the future zkSync is working tirelessly towards the following goals:
- Low tx cost and high throughput
- Setting the industry-standards of L2 security. In case you didn’t know, zkSync hosted a 1 MILLION USD C4 contest last year
- Interoperability between different chains via ZkStack
4. What advice would you give to developers interested in working in Web3?
Find your weapons and master them.
For me, security is a natural expression of how I think through and express things.
I don't consider myself very smart to be honest, I believe I am quite dumb. So, it takes some time for me to register any new piece of information because for me to really understand it, I have to break down that information into an ELI5 level. The benefit of that however is that once I have broken down a complex codebase or concept into such a simplistic level that it can be explained to a 5 year old, it also becomes exceedingly clear to me.
THAT is security to me. That is how I do security. Breaking down systems to such a minute level that all the hidden flaws become self-evident.
So, find your own path by asking yourself what is your edge and how to turn that into a competitive advantage. Here’s a cool thread I wrote on this topic.
And of course, work hard. That’s something I hope is common knowledge, that you do not need to hear from me.
