Programming languages, the infinite garden, and great storytelling. I am Gabriel, researcher and engineer.
Welcome to my page.
Purpose
Writing is a formalized form of thinking, which makes this page an exercise in sensemaking. Here, I write my thoughts — mostly about technology. This page is also an attempt to document and share ideas that might benefit the broader industry.
About me
I design adversary-resilient algorithms for Ethereum protocol infrastructure and implement them end-to-end — from formal proofs to production smart contracts and off-chain clients.
My work focuses on how to make permissionless systems secure under adversarial conditions: Sybil attacks, censorship, resource exhaustion. I co-authored the Dave algorithm, a fraud-proof primitive that gives honest validators an exponential cost advantage over adversaries, published in ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies. Before Dave, I implemented the Permissionless Refereed Tournaments algorithm in Solidity, Rust, and Lua — and through that work identified the liveness limitations that motivated Dave's design. The implementation powers Cartesi's Stage-2 fraud-proof system.
I've published several analyses on ethresear.ch — including "Fraud Proofs Are Broken," "The Dave Algorithm," and "Best of Both Worlds?" — that have shaped how the L2 community evaluates fraud-proof trade-offs, engaging researchers from Arbitrum, OP Labs, and L2BEAT. I presented the Dave algorithm at Devcon SEA 2024.
I'm a contributor in the Cartesi ecosystem, where I've worked since 2020, first part-time as a software engineer, then as lead blockchain researcher, and now as research lead. Before that, my research was in programming languages, advised by professor Roberto Ierusalimschy.
Here's my CV.