Meet Your Judges

As our first hackathon grows ever closer, Ergonauts and the Ergo community are excited to present our judges for ERGOHACK.

From June 11th-13th, these judges will evaluate proposals on topics like tokenization schemes, visual tools for constructing multi-signatures, stealth address pool implementations, tools for NFTs and many more.

So without further ado, allow us to introduce…


Alexander Slesarenko

Slesarenko is an ERGO Foundation Board Member and graduate of Applied Mathematics from Udmurt State University. He has extensive experience in software development as a team leader, architect and researcher. He worked as Team Leader at Huawei Research Lab focusing on developing languages and compilers for high-performance big data processing. Alexander is a Blockchain Core Developer and Lead Developer of ErgoScript at ERGO.

Aleksei Pupyshev

Aleksei is currently also the Founder of Graviton, and a Co-Founder of Neutrino protocol and Gravity protocol.

He initially became involved in the crypto space in 2014, when he led a team at an algorithmic HFT hedge fund focusing on mining pool analytics and developing liquidity models for one of the first crypto exchanges. 

In 2015, when Ethereum became popular, Aleksei hired an R&D team to prototype a smart contract crypto loan service. Two years later, realizing the full power of smart contacts and decentralization, Aleksei started working on crypto projects more actively by founding Venlab.

In 2019, the Venlab team entered a partnership with the Waves ecosystem to develop the Neutrino stablecoin and Gravity inter-chain protocol. After successfully launched, both of the projects were fully transferred to Waves in 2020 and 2021 correspondingly. 

Robert Kornacki

Robert Kornacki has been an ERGO community member from day one and has been involved with Cardano since 2017. In 2019, he became a dLab/EMURGO Fellow, following that up in 2020 as EMURGO’s Head of R&D and board member of the ERGO Foundation. In 2021 he co-founded a new crypto development company, dcSpark.

Robert has worked on numerous projects within the Ergo ecosystem including oracle pools, the headless dApp framework, and ErgoScript by example, ageUSD and more. He has also conducted extensive research on what is possible in the EUTXO model.

Alexander Chepurnoy AKA Kushti

Alexander Chepurnoy is an experienced blockchain developer, speaker and educator. From 2014 to 2015 he was a core developer on Nxt blockchain and a Co-Founder of smartcontract.com, now known as Chainlink. From 2016 to 2017 Alexander worked as a Lead Developer at Waves and Scorex Manager at IOHK. He began his journey with Ergo in 2016.

Alexander is a graduate of the State Petersburg National Research University, where he also taught a course on cryptography and blockchain technology. He is widely cited on Google Scholar and has spoken and numerous blockchain events and conferences worldwide.

Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo

Bruno contributed to Scorex (the basis of Ergo) back in 2017 and later joined Input Output, where he is currently Technical Director for Stablecoins and CBDCs. He designed the SigmaUSD stablecoin that has been developed by Ergo and Emurgo.

Bruno studied Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, pursued his MSc in Computational Logic at TU-Dresden and TU-Vienna and received his PhD in Computer Science at TU-Vienna. Before joining the cryptocurrency space, Bruno was an active and accomplished researcher in the fields of Logic, Automated Reasoning and Proof Theory, at Inria, TU-Vienna and Australian National University.

The judges and the Ergo community at large look forward to seeing the proposals that talented developers submit at ERGOHACK. For more information on the event see our blog post.