Brendan is a co-founder of Polygon and co-leads Polygon Zero, a team focused on the research and development of zero-knowledge cryptography. Polygon Zero is responsible for plonky2 and starky, best-in-class ZK proving systems that brought efficient proof recursion to Ethereum. Previously, he co-founded Mir, a blockchain focused on using zero-knowledge cryptography for privacy and scalability, in 2019. Mir was acquired by Polygon in December of 2021. He studied math and philosophy as an AB Duke scholar at Duke.