Sergey is the co-founder and CEO of Axelar, a decentralized blockchain interoperability network. He received a Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a Microsoft Ph.D. fellow. His Ph.D. dissertation was on designing cryptographic tools for the cloud using lattice-based cryptography for which he received the Sprowls Doctoral Thesis Award for best thesis in CS at MIT. Sergey is a co-author of many cryptographic protocols, standards, and systems. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo and was on the founding team of Algorand, where he worked on the core platform design and development and led the cryptography group.