Derek Chiang

Derek Chiang is the Founder and CEO of ZeroDev, a company he established in October 2022.13 ZeroDev is described as a "wallet operating system" for building smart crypto wallets powered by account abstraction.2 The company was part of Y Combinator's W23 batch and is backed by a16z CSS.3

Professional Background

Before founding ZeroDev, Derek had a diverse career in the tech industry:

Previous Roles::

• Co-Founder & CTO at Eternal (April 2019 - October 2022)13
• Founder of Binary Mint (July 2018 - April 2019)3
• Director of DApp Development at Thunder Token (March 2018 - July 2018)3
• Senior Software Engineer at DFINITY (October 2017 - March 2018)13
• Lead Engineer at Pachyderm, Inc. (March 2016 - October 2017)3

Education and Early Career

Derek studied computer science at Cornell University.2 He grew up in Shenzhen, China.2 His early career included internships and contract work with companies such as HashiCorp, CoreOS, and upthere.3

Expertise and Contributions

Derek has extensive experience in:

• Distributed systems
• Blockchain technology
• Web3 development
• Crypto technologies

He has contributed to the specification and reference implementation of ERC-4337, a key standard for account abstraction.5

Current Focus

At ZeroDev, Derek is working on solving Web3 user experience challenges.6 The company provides embeddable and programmable smart (AA) wallets, aiming to make it easier for developers to integrate features like social authentication, Passkey signers, and gas sponsorships into their applications.4

Derek's work at ZeroDev is inspired by his experience at Eternal, where he encountered firsthand the challenges of onboarding Web2 users to Web3 platforms.4