Bobbin (@bobbinth @0xMiden), core developer and CEO. He's generally known for his experience at Polygon (@0xPolygon) as Miden. He's a typical self-taught ZooKeeper developer, highly adept at learning ZooKeeper technology (theory) through practice. He successfully raised $25 million to build a privacy-preserving L2 blockchain. Let's look at Bobbin's career path. Bobbin's Web3 journey began around 2018, when he wasn't a full-time blockchain professional but active as an independent researcher and open-source contributor. His interest in zero-knowledge proofs stemmed from his fascination with "computational integrity," particularly general proof systems like SNARKs and STARKs. Bobbin recalls, "The moment I encountered zero-knowledge proofs, I immediately realized their critical importance to blockchain—they allow you to verify computations without someone else having to rerun the entire process." His first milestone was genSTARK (around 2018-2019), his first open-source STARK prover. genSTARK was an experimental tool for generating and validating STARK proofs, addressing a pain point in the ZK community at the time: the lack of efficient open-source implementations. Bobbin was an independent developer with no large company background; he built it by teaching himself the Rust programming language. This work brought him to prominence in the ZK community, earning him the reputation of being a pioneer of "the first practical STARK prover." Following this, he developed Distaff VM (early 2020). This was a STARK-based virtual machine prototype (I first learned about zkvm's implementation principles through this zkvm), inspired by the RISC-V architecture, designed to support general-purpose computing ZK proofs. Distaff was the precursor to the Miden VM. Bobbin conducted numerous iterations and user tests during its development, even personally writing AirScript (a simple assembly language) and AirAssembly to simplify VM programming. In late 2020, Bobbin joined Meta's (Facebook) Novi project as a core ZK researcher. Novi is Meta's digital wallet and blockchain experimentation division, aiming to explore privacy technologies within the Libra (post-Dieem) ecosystem. This was his "highlight"—he led the development of Winterfell, a high-performance, general-purpose STARK prover and validator. It supported parallel proof generation, achieving speeds several times faster than earlier STARK implementations. Bobbin was responsible for architecture design and optimization within the team, handling the entire process from circuit compilation to proof aggregation. This experience gave him expertise in enterprise-level ZK deployment. After that came the previously mentioned acquisition by Polygon, leading to the development of Miden.