About

👋 Hey there, I’m Philipp, a Cryptography Engineer.

On this website you’ll find resources covering everything related to Cryptography, Data Privacy and Data Security.

My main goal with the content I’m publishing here is to bridge the gap between theory and practice so that other developers or curious visitors in general get exposure to seemingly complex topics in a more digestible way while still retaining the necessary theoretical rigor.

You can always send me an E-Mail to philipp -at- muens.io if you have any questions or just want to get in touch.

Table of contents

Work

Throughout my professional career I worked on various projects in the Applied Cryptography, Blockchain and Open Source space. The following is an excerpt from my CV which you can find on LinkedIn.

Trips

As the VP, Head of Engineering I lead the engineering division which was tasked to implement the Trips Protocol, a digital copyright management- and monetization platform that allows creators to authenticate and monetize their content.

My day-to-day included planning, management and execution of different engineering efforts. Throughout the project’s lifetime I architected three different evolutions of the Trips Protocol while overseeing and participating in the implementation of such on an EVM Blockchain.

The Protocol’s first version emphasized a data-centric app experience. YouTube creators were able to connect their YouTube account to analyze the data their videos generated while highlighting opportunities to improve and monetize their content by storing its copyright as an NFT on a Blockchain.

The second iteration focused on a DeFi Protocol-centric solution which consisted of a series of Smart Contracts written in Solidity. Those Smart Contracts could be composed and built upon in a permissionless fashion to further extend the Protocol’s utility. Copyright was still minted as an NFT on-chain but could now be fractionalized to access liquidity. A back office implementation allowed our team to operate certain aspects of the protocol in a convenient way.

The third and last evolution of the Trips Protocol further unified the two prior iterations. It allowed for a self-serve onboarding experience in which YouTube creators were able to connect their YouTube channels and mint NFTs against their published videos. A back office allowed our team to control the Protocol while an investor-focused application allowed institutional investors to analyze performance data and reach out to creators to submit buy orders for partial ownership.

Celsius

At Celsius I worked as a DeFi Research Engineer in the Research- and Development department called CelsiusX.

Our team’s main goal was to build an on-chain liquidity bridge to allow Celsius users to bring crypto assets from a source chain such as Bitcoin to the Ethereum- and Polygon Mainnet. Users could then deploy their assets into various DeFi Protocols.

The first version of the bridge went live after ~6 months and was operated by different internal teams through a Web 3 dApp I built that allowed us to monitor our on-chain reserves, as well as mint and burn cx Tokens.

The goal for the second iteration of the liquidity bridge was to move to a decentralized and permissionless model. I lead this effort and our team successfully implemented a prototype in Go that bridged crypto assets via the lock-and-mint and burn-and-release mechanisms. Technology-wise the bridge was implemented as a Peer-to-Peer MPC network that managed keys and signed transactions via a Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS). The Smart Contracts that integrated with the bridge were written in Solidity.

Serverless

As one of the first engineers that got hired by Serverless I wore a lot of different hats throughout the startup’s journey to Product-Market-Fit.

My main focus, however was to design, develop and steer the direction of the Serverless Framework, a widely adopted Open Source project in the Cloud Computing space. While working on the project with the Open Source community I helped to evolve it from v0.5 to v1 and finally v2.

Given the Cloud Computing focus, we also fostered deep relationships with Cloud Providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud to integrate their product offerings into the Serverless Framework.

I also co-designed Serverless Components, an experimental successor of the Serverless Framework that focused on composability and reusability.

The Serverless Framework was also integrated deeply with the Serverless Platform, a Cloud-based development toolkit for businesses and professionals that work together with serverless teams and workflows.