Anna Kaplan joined the Zcash Foundation as a technical intern on Monday! She will spend the next few months with us, focusing on Parity’s Zcash node implementation.

Currently, Anna is a student pursuing two degrees, one in cryptography and mathematics and one in politics and technology, at Technical University of Munich, Germany. She finished her thesis on a cryptographic universally composable and privacy-preserving audit protocol in Zurich last semester, working with IBM Research.

At the Foundation, Anna will work on improving the Parity Zcash codebase, particularly with respect to testing and benchmarking. Additional possibilities include figuring out how to import the zcashd chainstate database to Parity Zcash, and examining how miners will use and interact with the node software.

For the time being, the Parity team is enthusiastic about Anna starting on codebase optimization — as is the Zcash Foundation!