Bobbin Threadbare

Bobbin Threadbare is the project lead of Miden, a STARK-based zero-knowledge rollup originally developed at Polygon and later spun out as an independent project that raised $25 million in 2025. Before Miden, he was a core ZK researcher at Facebook's Novi, where he led development of Winterfell, a high-performance general-purpose STARK prover. He released genSTARK, the first open-source STARK prover, built Distaff VM, the first practical STARK-based virtual machine, and created the AirScript and AirAssembly languages with support from the Ethereum Foundation. He works under a pseudonym (borrowed from the game Loom) and keeps his identity private, so the public record is his work rather than his biography.

16 talks by Bobbin Threadbare

• Is Onchain Privacy Finally Possible?: Naomi Brockwell, Bobbin Threadbare, Wei Dai, Ilia Volokh
• Onchain Privacy in the Age of Payments | Money Rails 2025 | Polygon Labs
• Episode 376 - Miden & the Edge Blockchain with Bobbin & Gaylord
• ZK12: Lessons from integrating LogUp-GKR in the Miden VM - Bobbin Threadbare & Philippe Laferrière
• ZK HACK IV - Provable State Changes: Polygon Miden Transaction Kernel
• ZK10: Optimizing recursive STARK verification in Polygon Miden VM - Bobbin Threadbare
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions – Module Sixteen: Multi-Asset Shielded Pools
• Using a Hybrid UTXO and Account-based State Model in a ZK Rollup by Bobbin Threadbare
• ZK Whiteboard Session – Module Twelve: zkID with Oleksandr Brezhniev
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions – Module Eight: Achieving Decentralised Private Computation
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions - Module Four: SNARKs vs STARKs with Bobbin Threadbare
• ZK7: Miden VM: a STARK-friendly VM for blockchains - Bobbin Threadbare – Polygon
• ZK HACK mini - Introduction to Miden VM
• ZK HACK mini - Writing STARK proofs with Winterfell
• Episode 210: The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare
• zkStudyClub: AirScript presented by Bobbin Threadbare