Raul Jordan

On February 11, 2015 Rough Draft Ventures published, in its Medium publication covering student startups, an article by Lisa Wang introducing Kynplex, a project it supported, and its two founders, Grace Xiao and Raul Jordan. The article states that the two were then freshmen at Harvard University who had noticed an asymmetry in information between research labs and the public and started Kynplex to build “the only publicly accessible and comprehensive database of national and international research labs,” and to connect labs with companies looking for recent breakthroughs so that ideas could become products.⁠[1]

The article states that the two founders then led the Harvard College Undergraduate Research Association and the Harvard Undergraduate Biotechnology Association and had worked with Harvard labs and biotech startups to identify the features they needed. Kynplex allowed searches by research category, institution, person or location; labs could create custom profiles and post research updates, which were collected on a highlights page; the product was available on the web and as an iOS app. The article adds that Kynplex planned a beta launch with selected labs the following month.⁠[1]

On February 18, 2016 BetaKit published an article by Jessica Galang stating that Grace Xiao, a Vancouver native, and her friend Raul Jordan had found it difficult to find research labs to join at Harvard, and that the two were co-founders of Kynplex. Grace Xiao said that as co-executives of Harvard’s biotechnology association she and Raul Jordan quickly realized that the science industry faced a similar problem. The article describes Kynplex as an online networking tool for science labs, companies and investors: labs, companies and investors could connect and collaborate through it; labs could showcase projects, and companies could search by research interest, location and institution.⁠[2]

The article states that Grace Xiao had received support from the Harvard Innovation Lab for two years to develop Kynplex, had been invited to pitch at the Thiel Summit in San Francisco and had been accepted as a 2016 Thiel Fellow; the team was expanding across the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and preparing to take Kynplex international, and Grace Xiao said that a Canadian expansion was especially exciting.⁠[2]

On June 21, 2016 the Thiel Foundation announced that it had accepted 29 new members into the 2016 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, which, the announcement states, gives young people $100,000 to learn by doing rather than by following conventional paths. In the list “Introducing the 2016 Thiel Fellows” he shares an entry with Grace Xiao (he is the tenth fellow listed), with Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry as hometown, Kynplex as project and communication software as field; the list describes the two as co-founders of Kynplex, a startup that provides communication tools for scientific laboratories and aims to accelerate the pace of discovery by connecting the fragmented world of scientific research.⁠[3]

In the self-introduction on his personal website he writes that the Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant, allowed him to take time off from school to pursue his passions, and that thanks to the fellowship he got into Ethereum.⁠[4]

In a roadmap post published on March 6, 2018 he writes that in January 2018 he planned to put together a strong team of developers, called Prysmatic Labs, to tackle Ethereum’s scalability problem; the team set up a code repository and a Gitter chat and began drafting a plan for implementing sharding.⁠[5]

The Block’s 2022 profile of Preston Van Loon states that Van Loon met Raul Jordan, then a co-founder of a science research network and a computer science teacher, in chat rooms related to Ethereum clients and sharding; a few days later the two met up in New York and decided they could put a team together, and with two other developers they founded Prysmatic Labs, whose initial goal was to build an implementation of sharding that could be added to the main Ethereum codebase.⁠[6]

In a 2021 interview with The Defiant, Preston Van Loon recalled that he met Raul Jordan online, that both of them were asking at the same time why nobody was building sharding and who wanted to build it with them, and that they linked up a couple of days later in New York City; he likened the meeting to something “kind of like a first date.”⁠[7]

The post “Introducing Prysmatic Labs 🎉” on the Medium account @rauljordan states that, worried about the ambitious expectations the blockchain community had of Ethereum, the author put together a team of blockchain engineers on a mission to scale Ethereum to the next level. It says that Layer-2 solutions and sharding both faced challenges, that there was a developer “bystander effect,” and that few teams outside Ethereum Research had taken up the work; Prysmatic Labs was building the first implementation of sharding for the go-ethereum client and was looking for cryptographers and developers with game-theory experience.⁠[8]

On March 6, 2018 he published “Ethereum Sharding Update— Prysmatic Labs Implementation Roadmap” on Prysmatic Labs’ Medium blog, setting out the plan for implementing sharding and a release roadmap in three stages, Ruby, Sapphire and Diamond, the last being a mainnet release targeted for 2019, and writing that the team needed more Go developers.⁠[5]

The Block writes that two months after it was founded Prysmatic Labs received a $100,000 grant from the Ethereum Foundation, and that in connection with the grant Preston Van Loon and some of the team flew to Taipei to meet other Ethereum researchers.⁠[6]

On December 12, 2018 EthHub released the podcast episode “Ethereum 2.0 with Prysmatic Labs: Scaling, Sharding, Proof of Stake, Serenity Phases, and Eth 2.0 Client,” hosted by Anthony Sassano, in which he and Preston Van Loon joined as guests from Prysmatic Labs to discuss Ethereum 2.0. The episode description lists the history of Prysmatic Labs, how it contributes to Ethereum 2.0 research and development, sharding, proof of stake and the Eth 2.0 client the team was building; it was the second episode of a five-part series on scaling Ethereum.⁠[9]

The Block writes that once the emphasis of Ethereum research was no longer on sharding, Prysmatic Labs switched to building a client called Prysm; Preston Van Loon recalled that the team had to start over and deleted its entire codebase. In May 2019 Prysmatic Labs released the first testnet iteration of the Prysm client.⁠[6]

On July 5, 2019 he published “10 Key Takeaways from a Harvard Education” on his blog, opening with the words: “Coming from Honduras, attending college in the U.S. felt an unattainable dream during my high school years.” He writes that at the start of his first year he promised himself he would not leave an unchanged man; the post looks back on his four years as an undergraduate at Harvard University and describes the 2019 Commencement as closing his college years, and graduation as having a serious tone for him.⁠[10]

The post sets out ten lessons, among them “Do something, do it passionately, and do it well,” “Unbridled ambition has a cost” and “The ‘real world’ is nuanced.” He argues that people attend Harvard mainly for its network and that its education is largely social, while defending a higher education that offers diverse perspectives and a structured path in which students can explore and make mistakes freely.⁠[10]

He writes that he took Professor Katherine Merseth’s course USW 35, “Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education,” which pushed students to question their privilege and to visit Boston schools to compare opportunities across social classes; he also joined Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts which matched students as mentors with younger kids from disadvantaged positions, and writes that role models from his youth shaped him.⁠[10]

On August 7, 2019 the Zero Knowledge Podcast released episode 89, “Eth2.0 update and a look at Libra with Raul Jordan.” The description states that the show invited him back from Prysmatic Labs to give an update on Prysmatic Labs and ETH2.0 development and to discuss recent innovations, existing challenges, timelines and implementation challenges, as well as an article he had published comparing the Libra protocol with public blockchains; it also links the show’s earlier episode 37 with Prysmatic Labs and the Sapphire testnet.⁠[11]

On May 27, 2021 episode 181 of the Go Time podcast, “Building for Ethereum in Go,” hosted by Angelica Hill, featured two of Prysmatic Labs’ co-founders, Raul Jordan and Preston Van Loon, who talked about how they started the company and what it is like to build technical infrastructure for the Ethereum blockchain in Go.⁠[12]

His personal website states that he co-founded Prysmatic Labs with Preston Van Loon to implement Ethereum’s core protocol, including proof of stake, and that on September 15, 2022 his team was one of the leading groups that eliminated Ethereum mining. The website states that the company’s main project, Prysm, is an open-source Go implementation of Ethereum proof of stake.⁠[4]

The Block’s article of September 5, 2022 states that, as a founder of Prysmatic Labs, Preston Van Loon runs the most widely used Ethereum consensus-layer client; over the following year or so Prysm became so popular that at one point more than two thirds of validators were using it, and at the time of writing it was the client running on around 35% of Ethereum’s nodes.⁠[6]

On September 20, 2022 he published “When Years of Work Finally Materialize” on his blog.⁠[13]

On October 12, 2022 The Block published an article stating that Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, had acquired Prysmatic Labs, the developer and operator of Prysm, which more than 43% of Ethereum nodes then used to run the network on proof of stake. After the acquisition Prysmatic Labs would keep focusing on Prysm under Offchain Labs, while Offchain Labs continued to build Arbitrum and Arbitrum Nova. Raul Jordan, as co-founder, said that because both companies were focused on infrastructure for scaling Ethereum the deal “made perfect sense,” and that both were “fully incentive-aligned with the success of Ethereum.”⁠[14]

Decrypt, drawing on clientdiversity.org data, wrote that 41.5% of validator nodes used Prysm, more than any other client. He said in the article: “The Prysm client will continue to be a leader in Ethereum node software,” and that upcoming Ethereum work was largely aimed at improving layer 2s, with Ethereum following a “rollup-centric roadmap”.⁠[15]

Decrypt pointed to a possible conflict of interest: Prysmatic Labs would help shape Ethereum’s relationship with layer 2s while a layer-2 company now funded its work. He replied that client diversity would discourage favoritism, that deliberately disadvantaging other teams would be obvious to the community and users would switch clients, and that Prysm would “remain neutral on all fronts.”⁠[15]

CointelegraphCointelegraphCointelegraph is a digital news outlet covering blockchain, digital assets, artificial intelligence, and fintech, known for its cartoon-style news illustrations. It also runs businesses including Cointelegraph Magazine, research, an accelerator, and events.Open the full entry wrote that Offchain Labs announced the deal in a blog post on October 13 and that the financial terms were not disclosed. He said the merger would “build a unified team stronger than the sum of its parts” and that “Merging with Offchain Labs made perfect sense to us as an Ethereum team”; he also cited the team’s extensive use of Go, its alignment with Ethereum’s success and its focus on shipping quality software. The article states that the team would keep developing Prysm as an open-source, neutral consensus client and bring EIP-4844 data sharding to production.⁠[16]

His personal website states that Prysmatic Labs joined Offchain Labs, the team behind Arbitrum, through an acquisition, and that Arbitrum has processed more than 790 million transactions since its launch.⁠[4]

On August 4, 2023 Offchain Labs unveiled BOLD (Bounded Liquidity Delay), a dispute protocol, intended to bring permissionless, decentralized validation of fraud proofs to its Arbitrum chains.⁠[17]

On August 9, 2023 the Bankless podcast released “Arbitrum’s BOLD New Bet with Ed Felten & Raul Jordan,” hosted by Ryan Sean Adams and David HoffmanDavid HoffmanDavid Hoffman is a co-owner and podcast co-host of the American crypto media outlet Bankless, which he runs together with Ryan Sean Adams; the two also co-founded the venture capital fund Bankless Ventures.Open the full entry. The description calls him one of the co-founders of Prysmatic Labs; introducing him at the start, the host mentioned that Prysmatic Labs had not long before been acquired by Offchain Labs and said “welcome back to the show.” The episode covered what BOLD is, what it solves, how it works, why it was hard to build whether it would be open source, its timeline and shared sequencing, as well as the decentralization and security of layer 2s, staking ARB, Arbitrum’s new technology and Ethereum’s overall roadmap.⁠[18]

As of November 2026, the homepage of his personal website describes him as a software engineer and one of the maintainers of the Ethereum blockchain protocol who believes technology can help build a “less zero-sum world,” likes to write code in Go and Rust and created the large open-source project Prysm; the homepage also says that he is not currently working and is exploring the joy of programming every day.⁠[13]

His personal website states that he was born and raised in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and studied computer science at Harvard University.⁠[4]

In “Why I Speak Cantonese,” published on July 1, 2020, he writes that Cantonese is his favorite language and that people who know him know how much time he devotes to it each day; his partner, mak6 gaa1 kei4, is a native and proud Cantonese speaker whose irreplaceable identity is bound up with her hometown, food and family, and he knew that he needed to study her language thoroughly to grow closer to her. He writes that the couple has spent a considerable amount of time in Guangdong and Hong Kong, where they felt very welcome among the locals, and that his favorite interaction was when her father would introduce him to his friends or other locals as man6 lung4, saying that he speaks only Cantonese and not Mandarin.⁠[19]

He writes that he learns with the help of a teacher from Hong Kong whom he calls “Yuen louh5 si1” (Teacher Yuen), practicing vocabulary and traditional characters every day, and that he believes anyone can master the roughly 2,500 characters needed for functional literacy in Cantonese; the couple visits Chinatowns across the United States in search of new dim sum places. He writes that he obviously still has a very long way to go, and that when anyone asks how his Cantonese is doing, his trusty reply, in Cantonese, is that he is still learning.⁠[19]

The posts on his blog, “rauljordan::blog,” include “My foray into machine learning” (February 3, 2017), “Winning a Facebook GraphQL hackathon” (February 4, 2017), “Writing an Ethereum serialization library using reflection” (July 2, 2019), “Building a Service Registry in Go” (March 10, 2020), “Immutability Patterns in Go” (May 25, 2020), “Why Go’s Error Handling is Awesome” (July 6, 2020), “Custom Static Analysis in Go, Part I” (November 1, 2020), “Reuse Expensive Computation With In-Progress Caches in Go” (January 5, 2021), “When a Solution Is Right In Front of You” (February 18, 2021), “Using Interface Composition in Go As Guardrails” (June 10, 2021), “How to Set Up an Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Devnet in Minutes” (October 20, 2022), “Rust concepts I wish I learned earlier” (January 16, 2023), “Reminiscing on my early days writing software” (July 9, 2023) and “No sleep until we build the ideal pub/sub library in Go” (June 22, 2024).⁠[20][21][13]

The blog’s homepage lists “Rust Concepts I Wish I Learned Earlier,” “10 Takeaways from a Harvard Education” and “Why I Speak Cantonese” as its highlights.⁠[13]

A Blockworks speaker page describes him as a senior software engineer at Offchain Labs, the team that built Arbitrum, and as an Ethereum core developer and maintainer of Prysm, the most popular software running the Ethereum blockchain’s consensus.⁠[22]

Personal website: https://rauljordan.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

X: Public account: https://x.com/rauljordaneth (opens in a new window).⁠[13][4]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/rauljordan (opens in a new window).⁠[13][4]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]

Offchain Labs: Official website: https://www.offchain.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]