Who
L2 Africa July 2023 participants
Participant profiles coming on the L2 Africa trip
Jul 19, 2023
Find the bios of the July/August Layer2 Africa participants, and topics you can talk to them about.
Patrick McCorry
Patrick leads Research and Education at the Arbitrum Foundation. He has spent most of his adult life working on cryptocurrencies and his time was split across academic research and industry. In a past life, he was an Assistant Professor at King’s College London and an accomplished researcher at UCL, UIUC and NCL.
Talk to Patrick about :
Technical discussion around protocol design
User experience of crypto / bottlenecks to it
Why do they care about it
Ye Zhang
Co-founder of Scroll
Ye Zhang is the co-founder of Scroll, a general-purpose Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum based on zkEVM. At Scroll, he leads research and strategy. His research primarily focuses on hardware acceleration for zero-knowledge proofs and theoretical proving algorithms. He wants to learn more about real use cases of blockchain and the local communities in Africa.
Talk to Ye about:
Zero-knowledge proof
Layer 2 and real use cases
Community and event
Kartik Talwar
Kartik Talwar is the co-founder of ETHGlobal which is an organization that helps bring developers into the web3 ecosystem. ETHGlobal has been running developer focused hackathons and summits across the world for the past 5 years and has helped bring over 70,000 developers into the Ethereum ecosystem.
Talk to Kartik about: startups, community building
Jacob Willemsma
Jacob Willemsma leads partnerships at ETHGlobal where he helps connect the dots between talented developers and interesting problems. Jacob is also a software engineer and has held roles in engineering development and leadership for AI and blockchain companies. Outside of work, Jacob is an active token house delegate and a contributor to Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding.
Talk to Jacob about: community, events, developer relations, startups.
Jeff Coleman
Jeff Coleman is an Ethereum community member passionate about scaling research, deep technical dives, and better connecting the global Ethereum community.
Talk to Jeff about : Decision theory, Homebrew electronics, Solving large coordination problem
Songyi Lee
Songyi works at the intersection of community, DAOs, and culture. She is co-founder of Gatherings, an experience design studio for distributed teams to upgrade their human-ware. She is a core contributor to several DAOs, including Impact Collective, Spore, and she initiated a community of Asia based DAO builders. Songyi has been in crypto for over 10 years, building across identity, remittance, and bridging Web2 organizations to adopt Web3 philosophies and tools.
Talk to Songyi about : Community building, Cross-cultural experiment, DAO, Experience design
Yoseph Ayele
Yoseph is founder of Borderless Africa, a public goods initiative that is bridging global Web3 communities with African ecosystems. He invests in African startups and supports early stage founders. Previously he built and ran the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, a new immigration program targeting global founders and investors. Yoseph is from Ethiopia, grew up in Kenya, Tanzania & Nigeria. He holds a Bachelors degree from Harvard, and helped scale a Silicon Valley startup.
Talk to Yoseph about : African startups, borderless economy, community
