Sarayu Namineni

I'm a fifth-year master's student studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. My research interests include privacy-preserving technologies, cryptography, and blockchains.

Here is my CV.

Thesis

S. Namineni, Preserving privacy and proving reputation in decentralized token systems, December 2023. Thesis.

Projects

Blockchain Group (advised by Prof. Seth Goldstein)

I have worked on two projects which build upon the reputation-based decentralized lending system, ZUZ which allows users to generate capital by staking their own reputation.

Optimizing Ledger Operations (Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2022)

Implemented a prototype which allows users to define their own token specifications to generate capital and to mint and transfer token instances to accrue reputation
Optimized query performance by implementing prototype as a layer-1 smart contract and restructuring data
Developed client-side SDK to compare performance of various implementations of this system using blockchain protocols
Poster, Website

Privacy-Preserving Ledger Design and Implementation (Spring 2023, Summer 2023, Fall 2023)

Designed and implemented a privacy-preserving smart contract for this system on Ethereum with a single-step destination- and value-anonymous transfer
Designed multi-step origin-anonymous transfer with better incentivizes under the "pay for privacy" model
(In progress): Designing and implementing a privacy-preserving UTXO-based protocol for this system as an extension of ZCash
Poster, Report

Crypto Group (working with Ph.D. student Abhiram Kothapalli, supervised by Prof. Elaine Shi)

Efficient ZKPs for Blockchain Reputation (Fall 2023)

Developing cryptographic primitive that can efficiently update a zero-knowledge proof for the reputation of an address with respect to a blockchain according to an application-specific scoring function
Analyzing use case for decentralized applications, such as the reputation of debtors in peer-to-peer lending pools