Programming languages, the infinite garden, and great storytelling. I am Gabriel, researcher and engineer.
Welcome to my page.
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 be useful to others.
About me
My work has taken me from programming languages to Ethereum. I design protocols that hold in adversarial environments, and I build the systems that run them.
Three examples. I co-authored Dave, a peer-reviewed, permissionless and Sybil-resistant fraud-proof algorithm. Dave came after our earlier primitive proved too slow to settle under sustained attack. I built the proof system securing a Stage-2 rollup on Ethereum mainnet. And I shipped a high-throughput, low-latency app-specific sequencer that preserves censorship resistance and settlement. All of it open-source, and argued out in public.
In each case, the system was raised rather than architected top-down. I learned and practiced this discipline during my Master's in programming languages under Professor Roberto Ierusalimschy, creator of Lua, a programming language raised the same way.
The full record — roles, papers, talks, and the rest — is in my CV.
Writing
A few posts:
- Scaling Content (2022) — On content scalability: a fast machine with no software is still useless, so bring the existing stack into Ethereum.
- Fraud Proofs Are Broken (2024) — On the trade-offs between safety, settlement time and participation cost in permissionless fraud proofs, including our own design at the time.
- Enforceable Human-Readable Transactions (2025) — On checking what we sign without relying on a front end to describe it.
- Best of Both Worlds? (2025) — On how non-interactive ZK fraud proofs behave under censorship and Sybil attacks.
The fraud-proof essays drew technical responses from researchers at Offchain Labs, OP Labs, L2BEAT and RISC Zero, and helped shape the later discussion of fraud-proof trade-offs.
More in the posts.