Common Prefix is a blockchain research & development company. Blockchain technologies enable large-scale economic coordination through shared, programmable ledgers. Our mission is to solve the foundational scientific and engineering challenges standing in the way of mainstream adoption, particularly around interoperability, scalability, and usability. We combine formal scientific research with production-grade engineering. Our team publishes in top-tier peer-reviewed venues and builds open-source infrastructure used across major blockchain ecosystems. We have contributed to advanced systems including Axelar, XRPL, Sui, and Flashbots, and are trusted partners to protocols building critical infrastructure.
What we're looking for:
Software engineers who can solve problems, are smart, get things done, and enjoy working on the bleeding edge, learning about cryptography, and working from first-principles.
Tech stack: Doesn't matter, we'll teach you. But we work mostly with Rust, Go, and TypeScript.
Common Prefix is a science-first blockchain consulting company. Our vision is to make blockchains usable for mainstream users and everyday people – paying at the supermarket, remittances, moving money across borders, saving, investing – and solving the real problems of usability, scalability, and interoperability that come with it. We're a 30-person team, half scientists (cryptographer PhDs, post-docs, and professors) from renowned universities, half engineers with long web2 experience. A lot of our field is broken and we're trying to make a small contribution in fixing it, by introducing provable security and proper engineering practices across the board.
What we're looking for:
Software engineers who can solve problems, are smart, get things done, and enjoy working on the bleeding edge, learning about cryptography, and working from first-principles.
Auditors who can write and read code, especially low-level cryptographic implementation code (zero knowledge verifiers, signature schemes, etc), consensus (PoW, PoS), or smart contracts (everything DeFi).
Tech stack: Doesn't matter, we'll teach you. But we work mostly with Rust.
- $80,000–$160,000 / year cash
- Local from Athens, Greece, or remote, preferably in Europe
- Conference participation in exciting scientific and engineering venues, 2-3 times per year
- The opportunity to work and learn from world-class scientists from major universities in the field of blockchains, cryptography, and consensus
If you're interested in joining our team, please reach out to careers<at>commonprefix<dot>com with the subject line "HN: <Job Title>".
I'm a researcher. I write the articles in their books. They don't pay me for that. All of the articles are written by people like me. All of the articles are reviewed and edited by people like me. I even do the typesetting. I get paid by a tax-funded university. Publishers (such as Springer) use their money not to produce knowledge, but to sue people, market their conferences and journals, and pay their administrators and shareholders.
As many of us doing research, writing, reviewing, typesetting, checking proofs, organizing their dissemination conferences, administrative tasks, filling up IP forms, returning them, getting them checked by attorneys paid on our side, etc., etc., etc., do not get absolutely anything remotely in value to the price it costs to our institutions or peers to access our work.
We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme]
Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected]
However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.
The American Astronomical Society has taken a pretty powerful stance against the predatory journal publishing practice.
They are pushing their own field-recognized journals that are partially open-access (12mo blackout window, then fully open access) with the option to go full open access from the beginning for a surcharge, and are even working to provide publishing cost assistance for those in need of it (such as early-career scientists who may not have a lot of funding to lean on).
It's not ideal, given that there's still a somewhat high cost for a fully open-access publication (the "gold open access"), but at least it's there. Also, the fact that a paper "ages" into open access after 12 months means that the knowledge does eventually make it into public hands.
See eg the various initiatives against Elsevier's pricing practices with all/most German universities and a number of American universities refusing to pay Elsevier's fee/ransom.
Similarly the whole 'open access'publishing movement which sadly has been somewhat coopted by the big publishers.
You can check for yourself - on providing and dissemination, check Arxiv & Siblings. On institutions, check e.g., University of California, or search, e.g., "Elsevier's Paywall" using some internet search service to find names.
I was gladly surprised that a "low quality" (data/experiments were fine, but terrible copywriting) paper I wrote while in academia which I uploaded to Arxiv actually got some good amounts of citations ( and is even indexed by google scholar).
Having papers published in journals (especially prestigious ones like Nature) is how you attain status in the research community. Also most research institutions have some expectation that you will publish N papers a year on average (because it also enhances their status).
I'm a PhD student. To graduate, I need publications. The quality of my publications, and hence my possibility of graduation, is evaluated based on the reputation of the conferences I publish in. The same applies to a PhD graduate trying to get into a post-doc position, or a post-doc trying to get assistant professorship. For historical reasons, many of the reputable conferences are closed and ran by publishing houses that charge unfair money for them. We are trying to change that.
And if you approach Springer to try to publish something (e.g. a Book), and you have some draft of it online on your homepage or something - you'll be rejected outright. They won't publish unless they can monopolize it.
It does mean something. I'll make two indicative points.
First, if I'm looking to make money that I want to put into global investment, it doesn't matter where I earn it. The absolute number is what matters. In reality, the number that matters is how much I can save, in absolute numbers, after taxes and cost of living have been deducted, but still the salary does not scale with cost of living. In that case, if I'm willing to maximize my investment, it's possible that I'm willing to move to the best paying country (i.e. the country where I can earn the maximum absolute number after taxes and cost-of-living has been deducted) for a while. "Global investment" may be quite broad and may include, for example, effective global altruism (i.e., asking the question "If I want to maximize my life's impact in improving others' lives, where should I work and where should I donate globally?").
Second, if we're talking about a job that is a seller's market, i.e., where I have has some very specialized skill, then the fact that the company is willing to pay double the amount if I happen to live in Silicon Valley but only half the amount if I happen to live in Romania, is pretentious. The reason is that the company is in need of my skill regardless of where I live and my acceptable business cost to them is a Silicon Valley salary. The difference from paying me less just because I happen to live in Romania is simply money that goes into their pockets. Why shouldn't it go into mine? In fact, if my skill is specialized enough, I should be able to negotiate for that, since their best next alternative may be a Silicon Valley hire.
(For clarity, the above are illustrative examples. I'm not an effective altruist, do not have such a specialized skill, and do not live in Romania.)
I'm doing a PhD on cryptography/blockchains and working on the Cardano cryptocurrency (https://cardanoroadmap.com/). It's very technically interesting and challenging (though it pays a fraction of what I used to earn as a Software Engineer in a big company in Zurich.)
I spend most of my time thinking about mathematical problems that I feel are impactful and important. The solutions make use of theoretical computer science (computational reductions and such). Validating the results requires running small Monte Carlo style experiments typically written in C++, Python, or Javascript. This isn't rocket science code, but it's still challenging to think what kind of assumptions and constraints to put in the model / code and which ones to leave out (although the coding part itself is pretty standard.) Other than that I mostly write TeX :)
But our solutions are implemented by the IOHK software engineers that are working on the production software implementation of Cardano. It's quite interesting to guide that work through our papers, as it handles a multibillion dollar market cap and the responsibility for making sure everything is secure is big. As for social impact, this people may disagree with, but I feel we're building next generation economies and this will impact the whole of society in making it more egalitarian, giving access to money to everyone, and making salaries more equal across the globe.
Not sure what you mean, but good encryption algorithms (including GPG's RSA and DSA) are not vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks. Even if you know the plaintext and the cryptotext shouldn't help you in cracking the key in any way.
If you want to look at it rationally, he has pretty good chances of getting a good job in security now. It's likely he's looking at proposals by Google, Facebook, etc. Good recruiters love these kinds of things (and should, as they are a great measure of who is a passionate hacker).
The article is somewhat wrong in that for google.com in particular the browser would show an HSTS warning and disallow access completely, as it is a pinned cert.
So can Microsoft. The difference between Microsoft's "Search and pull" means that Apple needs to bump OS X's revision number or apply a Security Update, both which are visible as a red badge on the "Updates" tab of the Mac App Store. Microsoft doesn't need to even apply a super generic KB update.
Common Prefix is a blockchain research & development company. Blockchain technologies enable large-scale economic coordination through shared, programmable ledgers. Our mission is to solve the foundational scientific and engineering challenges standing in the way of mainstream adoption, particularly around interoperability, scalability, and usability. We combine formal scientific research with production-grade engineering. Our team publishes in top-tier peer-reviewed venues and builds open-source infrastructure used across major blockchain ecosystems. We have contributed to advanced systems including Axelar, XRPL, Sui, and Flashbots, and are trusted partners to protocols building critical infrastructure.
What we're looking for:
Software engineers who can solve problems, are smart, get things done, and enjoy working on the bleeding edge, learning about cryptography, and working from first-principles.
Tech stack: Doesn't matter, we'll teach you. But we work mostly with Rust, Go, and TypeScript.
Open roles:
- Software Engineer (mid): https://www.notion.so/commonprefix/Opening-Software-Engineer...
- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.notion.so/commonprefix/Opening-Senior-Software-E...
- DevOps: https://www.notion.so/commonprefix/Opening-DevOps-Engineer-2...
We offer:
- $50,000–$160,000 / year cash + stock grant + performance bonus (depends on level but not location)
- Local from Athens, Greece, or remote
- Conference participation in exciting scientific and engineering venues, 2-3 times per year
- The opportunity to work and learn from world-class scientists from major universities in the field of blockchains, cryptography, and consensus
Apply here:
https://commonprefix.notion.site/2b7bf672de828051b53cdd37811...