Celestia

Mustafa Al-Bassam (born January 1995) is a British computer security researcher, hacker, and co-founder of Celestia Labs. Al-Bassam co-founded the hacker group LulzSec in 2011, which was responsible for several high profile breaches. He later went on to co-found Chainspace, a company implementing a smart contract platform, which was acquired by Facebook in 2019. In 2021, Al-Bassam graduated from University College London, completing a PhD in computer science with a thesis on Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers. In 2016, Forbes listed Al-Bassam as one of the 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs in technology.

Ismail Khoffi is the CTO at Celestia. Ismail has a background in IT security, cryptography, key management, and blockchain infrastructure. Ismail was previously a Gesellschafter at mmmh Validator UG (haftungsbschränkt) from November 2019 to December 2020. Ismail was also a Senior Software Engineer at Interchain Foundation from September 2019 to January 2020, where they built parts of the tendermint light client in Rust and did related work (encoding, reviewing technical specification etc). From July 2019 to November 2019, they were an Independent Researcher (Fellowship) at Technische Universität Berlin, where they collaborated on Stellar-related research projects, co-authored a paper (preprint), and contributed to stellar-observatory. Ismail has also been an External Evaluation Expert at the European Commission from April 2019 to December 2019, and a Software Engineer at Tendermint from May 2018 to July 2019.Ismail Khoffi has a Diplom (Masters equivalent) in Mathematics and Computer Science from The University of Bonn as well as certification from Fraunhofer FIT as a Certified Usability Engineer.

John Adler is co-Founder and CRO at Celestia Labs. He is the creator of Optimistic Rollups, previously scalability researcher at ConsenSys.

Nick White is the COO at Celestia. Nick was previously with Harmony Protocol from June 2018 to December 2020 where they were a Co-Founder. Their work there focused on building scalable blockchain infrastructure to power the decentralized revolution. Prior to that, they were with Zeroth.ai from January 2017 to December 2018 as a Senior AI Specialist. Their work there focused on accelerating AI startups in Asia.Nick White has a Master of Science (MS) in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.