Derek Chiang

Chiang grew up in Shenzhen, studied computer science at CornellCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry, and worked on Consul at HashiCorp, DC/OS at Mesosphere and OpenStack at Nebula.⁠[1]

He was Pachyderm’s lead engineer in 2016–2017 and a senior software engineer at DFINITY in 2017–2018.⁠[2]

On October 21, he published an article on Go API options. Using the etcd client as an example, he proposed composing interfaces to reuse options across methods while catching incompatible options at compile time.⁠[3]

In 2018 he briefly directed DApp development at Thunder Token, then founded Binary Mint, developing and selling Tenfold Protocol technology.⁠[2]

From 2019 to 2022, he was Eternal’s cofounder and CTO, helping content creators monetize through digital collectibles.⁠[2]

In 2022 he founded ZeroDev, an account-abstraction wallet infrastructure company that joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch.⁠[4]

On April 25, he introduced ZeroDev’s Kernel, combining ERC-4337 compatibility, signature validation and transaction batching with plugins that extend validation logic, reducing the need for wallet developers to rebuild foundational components.⁠[5]

In a December 7 interview, he linked Eternal’s onboarding difficulties to his move into account abstraction and explained his preference for the EVM ecosystem.⁠[6]

On February 22, he explained ZeroDev’s move toward ERC-7579, arguing for minimal compatibility interfaces and implementation freedom. He criticized ERC-6900’s constraints on module composition, off-chain authorization and aggregators; these were his team’s technical positions at the time.⁠[7]

Offchain Labs acquired ZeroDev in 2025.⁠[1]

On March 25, he advocated Frame Transactions under EIP-8141, pairing a flexible transaction structure with default accounts and validation rules to balance extensibility, wallet security and mempool costs. The article advocated a proposal; it did not establish that the proposal had been implemented.⁠[8]

He joined Ethlabs in August 2026.⁠[2]

Ethlabs is a nonprofit research and development lab focused on Ethereum and ETHEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry; its official team list includes Chiang.⁠[9]

On October 29, he discussed EIP-7702 in relation to the Binance attack. He argued that batching accelerated transfers after compromise without establishing that 7702 itself was broken. He distinguished key theft from induced authorization signing and left the ultimate cause pending an official postmortem.⁠[10]