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Keel Formal
CEO
Five years and hundreds of reviews deep in complex DeFi — bespoke AMMs, novel lending, and the most advanced perps exchanges in the world.
- 400+ Critical and High issues reported and resolved
- GMX, Synthetix, Yuga Labs, USDT0, Ethena, M0, Dolomite, Azuki, Solady
Owen Thurm
Chief Executive Officer
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Keel Formal
CTO
Co-founded Keel Formal and drove its fuzzing research — the invariant work that now sits inside every audit.
- Hundreds of Critical and High issues found through fuzzing practice
- Fuzzing suites for EigenLayer, GMX, Yuga Labs, Synthetix, and USDT0
- Shaped the approach behind Keel Desk, Keel Formal’s Web3 DevSecOps platform
Daniel Gelfand
Chief Technology Officer
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Sales
Lead
A tenacious sales leader, passionate about driving the future of financial security.
- Leads Keel Formal’s sales team
- A decade of enterprise technology sales before Keel Formal, at HP and Oracle
Ashkan Khamsehpour
Sales Lead
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Operations
Lead
An organized and savvy operations leader with extensive cybersecurity service experience.
- Co-founder and CEO of HackTricks, one of the most popular cybersecurity training sites
- Level-headed, pragmatic leader
Bea
Operations Lead
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Offchain
Head
World-class pentester and coach across all cybersecurity domains, Head of Offchain Services at Keel Formal.
- Co-founded and built HackTricks training into one of the most popular online cybersecurity training and certification sites
- Coached team Europe to victory in ICCC 2025 in Japan
Carlos
Head of Offchain Services
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Research
Lead
Came to Web3 from elite red team work — payload development and EDR bypass — and reviews protocols with the same offensive habits.
- Led Halborn’s EVM audit team for two years; Lead Security Researcher at Spearbit
- Live Critical disclosures, including one with eight figures of TVL at risk
- Optimism, USDT0, Uniswap, GMX, Synthetix, Ethena
Roberto Reigada
Lead Security Researcher
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Research
Lead
Offensive reviews across an unusually wide spread of stacks — Cosmos and other Go projects, Ethereum, Sway.
- Led dozens of reviews in Halborn’s Special Operations department
- Story Protocol, Synthetix, Ethereal, Entangle Labs
Jakub Zmyslowski
Lead Security Researcher
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Research
Lead
A whitehat with a disclosure record — live Criticals reported to Beanstalk, Pinto, and Fluid.
- Unique Critical in the Fuel Blockchain Attackathon, contributing to a $156,000+ whitehat reward
- Deep experience across both Rust and EVM logic
Minato Namikazi
Lead Security Researcher
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Research
Lead
Six years of DeFi and smart contract audits, and Keel Formal’s lead architect on internal AI tooling.
- 250+ client engagements; multiple billions in digital assets secured
- Named inventor on US patent 12,456,118, for permission-based smart contract authorization
Ferran Celades Pons
Lead Security Researcher
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Research
Lead
Before entering Web3, Nicholas served as an Air Force pilot, bringing leadership experience shaped by mission-critical operational environments.
- Over three years of DeFi and perps exchange security experience
- Audits for major protocols including Tether, Synthetix, and Jupiter, and multiple top finishes in public audit contests
- Previously built production DeFi vaults as a Solidity engineer
Nicholas Chew
Lead Security Researcher
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Research
Lead
A renowned security researcher in the Web3 space, having won countless public security contests and previously co-founded a popular Web3 security firm himself.
- Placed #1 in audit competitions for Wormhole, Pump.fun, Yearn Finance, DeBank, and more
- Previously co-founded the Web3 security firm Obsidian, with a strong track record of client service
Spearmint
Lead Security Researcher
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Fuzzing
Head
Leads Keel Formal’s fuzzing practice. The frameworks, the open-source tooling, and the research into autonomous testing pipelines.
- Researching Ethereum consensus and application layers since 2019
- Adversarial bot races, and among the first to automate testing in EVM fuzzing
Vladimir Zotov
Head of Fuzzing
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Fuzzing
Senior
One of the most experienced smart contract fuzzing engineers in the industry, with the expertise to get a full invariant suite covering key edge cases running from the beginning of an audit.
- More than 2.5 years focused on fuzzing smart contract systems, and on developing Keel Formal’s approach to smart contract fuzzing
- Gives auditors a strong foundation to formalize the core invariants a protocol must uphold
- Often leads to the discovery of subtle edge cases that escape even the strongest manual reviewers or current state-of-the-art models
Michael Lett
Senior Fuzzing Researcher
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Research
Senior
Deep experience across cross-chain infrastructure, stablecoins, lending, exchanges, and derivatives.
- #1 on the Codehawks leaderboard for 2023; first place in the Liquity V2 contest
- LayerZero, Tether USDT0, M0, Liquity, GMX
Cosine
Senior Security Researcher
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Research
Senior
Specialises in advanced and novel DeFi integrations — the seams where protocols meet other protocols.
- Three years of DeFi security; a significant role in securing billions for Keel Formal clients
- Synthetix, LayerZero, USDT0, Story Protocol
Ciphky
Senior Security Researcher
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Research
Senior
Applies an attacker-focused mindset to identify vulnerabilities, challenge protocol assumptions, and analyze complex system designs.
- Focused on formal-methods research since transitioning from frontend development in 2023, with multiple first-place finishes in competitive auditing contests and several critical vulnerabilities uncovered
- Experience spanning AMMs, cross-chain protocols, staking, and reward distribution mechanisms; primarily Solidity on EVM chains, with experience reviewing Solana-based protocols
- Baseline, LayerZero, Synthetix, Yellow, and Jupiter
Zdravko Hristov
Senior Security Researcher
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Research
Senior
Came to onchain security from Web2, and brings that wider view of a system to the protocols he reviews.
- Excels at manual analysis, and performs especially well within team-based reviews
- A top performer across more than a dozen engagements since mid-2025
- Unique High and Critical findings for Universal, Synthetix, Ethena, and LayerZero
Ali Shehab
Senior Security Researcher
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Research
Senior
Known for leaving no stone unturned, combining fuzzing tools such as Echidna with extreme diligence for production scenarios to surface edge-case vulnerabilities that manual review alone would miss.
- A consistent top performer in Keel Formal reviews since the start of 2024
- A strong offensive mindset backed by pragmatic protocol experience, having previously been a lead protocol developer at a popular perps exchange
- Roughly three years in the field, across GMX, Synthetix, Bounce, M0, and USDT0, among others — a Web3 developer’s implementation-level understanding of the systems he audits, reasoned from both an attacker’s and a builder’s perspective
Felipe Gomez
Senior Security Researcher
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Research
Senior
Reviews across ecosystems and languages — Ethereum, Solana, and Canton; Solidity, Rust, Daml, and Go.
- Offensive security in Web3 since 2023, and at Keel Formal since early 2024
- USDT0, LayerZero, GMX, M0
- Keel contracts, protocol infrastructure, cross-chain systems, and off-chain components
Osman Ozdemir
Senior Security Researcher