Draft:Mario Yaksetig Costa

Mario Yaksetig Costa (born 1992), grandson of Mario Yaksetig Guzman, is a Portuguese cryptographer. He specialises in applied cryptography, blockchain, CBDCs, and privacy.

Early life and Education
Yaksetig studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto. In 2017, Yaksetig conducted his Master thesis research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County under Professor Alan Sherman, notable student of cryptography icon Ron Rivest (one of the 2002 Turing Award winners). In this thesis, Mario studied and implemented a novel private user discovery protocol. . Yaksetig's research interests include privacy, hash-based cryptography, and formal methods verification.

Work
Mario started his career working alongside David Chaum, the creator of digital cash and mix networks. Mario was in charge of developing and analysing new cryptographic protocols for a novel anonymous communication network called Elixxir (now xx network). This work was highlighted by Edward Snowden.

Mario has worked alongside Neal Stephenson, the first person to coin the term Metaverse.

Mario has also made substantial contributions to the Central bank digital currency field having worked with the Bank for International Settlements on project Tourbillon. This work was cited by the IMF.

Research and Contributions
In collaboration with David Chaum, Alan Sherman, and Joeri de Ruiter, Mario co-authored a novel Private User Discovery protocol.

Mario is also a co-author in the first formal methods analysis on the Secure Remote Password protocol along with members affiliated with the National Security Agency and the Mitre Corporation.

Recently, Mario has been involved in the design of a novel online voting protocol that provides coercion resistance, alongside Alan Sherman, Bart Preneel, and David Chaum.

In 2021, Yaksetig was one of the co-creators of a novel quantum-secure fallback for cryptocurrency wallets. This work was later improved and presented at UMBC's Cyber Defense Lab. To date, this work remains the state-of-the-art.

In 2022, Mario broke the threshold hash-based signature scheme proposed by Vitalik Buterin. This work was published one year later at the poster track in the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS 2023)

In 2023, Mario has been involved in a novel ZKRollup approach. This work was highlighted by Buterin, one of the main creators of Ethereum.

Erdös Number
Yaksetig's Erdős number is 4. He co-authored with David Chaum, who co-authored with Gilles Brassard, who co-authored with Carl Pomerance, who co-authored with Paul Erdős.