Rishabh Gupta

My developer journey started in class 9th where I was first introduced to Java. This interest was boosted after I joined a workshop arranged by BRICS at IIT Kanpur on Robotics and Embedded systems. I worked on writing code on Arduino and for the first time, I saw my code doing things.

After joining IIT Kharagpur I got to meet a lot of people with similar interests and that was the first time I was introduced to open-source communities. In college, I was also involved in working with computer vision and reinforcement learning. In my third year, I worked on fruit detection using deep learning for an FPGA-based autonomous fruit-harvester robot. My friends and I later presented it at the 6th International Conference on Control, Automation and Robotics held in Singapore. At the end of my third year, I got a full scholarship to join the University Of Sydney as a summer intern where I worked on finding optimal execution strategies in a portfolio using deep reinforcement learning(RL) via parallel neuro-evolutionary algorithms. I was also involved in many research groups for deep learning which eventually helped me to be a part of four research papers in reputed International Conferences and Journals.

Last year I graduated from IIT Kharagpur and currently, I am working as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs where I am developing models to detect anomalies in time series data using deep learning and improve its quality. In my final year, I started reading about web3 and learning solidity. I have spent a lot of time learning the fundamentals of EVM and the security aspects of smart contracts. I am continuously seeking opportunities to learn and develop in a limited time which makes me an inquisitive developer.

My major learning and growth have been through taking part in hackathons. Currently, I have been diving deep into Web3 and apart from having a full-time job I am contributing around 30-40 hours per week to learning and developing decentralised applications. Here are some of the cool projects I have been a part of in web3 space:

• ZK Authentication (Winner of best new subgraph and top 10 optimism projects at ETH Online 2022):
  We designed the product for two main problems, first one is when a hacker steals a user's wallet secret code. We provide an extra layer of security using Zero Knowledge based 2 Factor Authentication. During the wallet creation, a Merkle tree is generated using a secret and the root is stored in the smart contract wallet. When the user provides the OTP using google authenticator during the transaction it is used to generate the root using Merkle inclusion proof inside the ZK circuit. After the root and proof are verified the transaction is processed. The second problem was when the user forgets the password of his wallet. We integrated a ZK-based social recovery for users. Currently extending this using semaphores from ETH Foundation to add trusted users and allow them to vote for user social recovery.

• Pecunia (Winner of 2nd prize Sequence Wallet at BUIDL IT 2022 and 2nd prize from Polygon in DevTooling at Moralis 1, 2, web3 hackathon):
  The protocol was built for safe and secure estate planning for the crypto assets of users. We used ZK Proofs for allowing the heirs to prove their identity to the verifier and claim their rightful assets. The owners can allow the heirs to claim their assets in small amounts at regular intervals which were achieved using Chainlink keepers. This will ensure that the assets are all not spent all at once and are only used for rightful purposes.

• Analyzing Uniswap V3 mempool transactions:
  This project was done with Arda Finance for analyzing the mempool transactions of Uniswap v3 and finding if a potential swap or remove liquidity order can cause an impermanent loss greater than the threshold. If so we can front-run a transaction with a higher gas fee to remove the liquidity.

• Katan NFT (Worldcoin Pool prize Winner):
  It allows users to obtain their DeFi credit scores in the form of a dynamic NFT. We used world coin to provide proof of personhood for an address.

Through these hackathons and training, I have not only learned the overall ecosystem of blockchain but specifically dived deep into the Ethereum Architecture and understood the core working Ethereum Virtual Machine. Understanding the security aspect of smart contracts has helped me grasp an even deeper understanding of the critical security pitfalls of smart contracts written in Solidity.