About

I'm Prad Nukala — an engineer and founder building decentralized identity infrastructure. As co-founder and CEO of Sonr, I'm building a peer-to-peer identity and data network powered by decentralized identifiers (DIDs), WebAuthn, and IPFS.

I help shape the open standards behind user-owned identity as a working-group member at the W3C (DIDs, WebAuthn, WebAssembly) and the Decentralized Identity Foundation (UCAN, DWN). I've been shipping software since age 12 — three apps with over 1M downloads, technical writing read 120k+ times, and bylines in Fast Company.

Find me on Github, X, LinkedIn, or contact me directly.

Projects

Layer-1 Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Ecosystem

2022 – Present (Sonr)
- Engineered a revolutionary “Gasless Onboarding” pipeline by writing custom Cosmos AnteHandlers to intercept and validate WebAuthn (Passkeys/Biometrics) credentials directly at the mempool level, completely abstracting away seed phrases and transaction fees for new users.
- Designed a capability-based authorization system integrating User-Controlled Authorization Networks (UCAN) and Decentralized Web Nodes (DWN) to provide granular, time-bound, and delegatable access to IPFS-backed encrypted data vaults.
- Bridged Web3 ecosystems by implementing full EVM compatibility alongside CosmWasm smart contracts, supporting multi-chain token mappings and cross-chain operations via IBC protocols.
- Built enterprise-grade DevOps infrastructure leveraging Kubernetes (Starship), Docker, and Devbox to orchestrate multi-node testnets and local development environments, utilizing GoReleaser for automated, multi-architecture CI/CD pipelines.
- Integrated automated legal compliance tooling directly into the blockchain CLI, generating cryptographic proofs and automated filings for Wyoming DAO LC amendments.
Core Cryptography Library (ZKP & MPC Infrastructure)

2022 – 2026 (Sonr)
- Implemented advanced Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) systems, including Bulletproofs (Range Proofs and Inner Product Proofs) and cryptographic accumulators, leveraging the Fiat-Shamir heuristic for efficient, non-interactive verification.
- Designed Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Distributed Key Generation (DKG) protocols, enabling decentralized infrastructure through Threshold ECDSA/Ed25519, FROST, and Gennaro signature schemes without single points of failure.
- Engineered highly secure, constant-time elliptic curve arithmetic across multiple standards (secp256k1, Ed25519, BLS12-381, NIST P-Curves), strictly enforcing safeguards against side-channel timing attacks, signature malleability, and nonce reuse.
- Hardened system security by integrating AES-GCM authenticated encryption and Argon2id memory-hard key derivation, backed by an exhaustive suite of automated security tests, race-condition checks, and performance benchmarks.
Beam — E2EE Decentralized Messaging

2022 – 2025 (Sonr)
- Led the architecture and hands-on development of Beam, a cross-platform end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) mobile messaging application built in React Native, directing a 6-engineer cross-functional team across mobile, infrastructure, and product.
- Architected and managed a self-hosted Matrix homeserver, customizing the decentralized Matrix protocol to deliver end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), censorship-resistant messaging with self-custodied message history.
- Engineered a passkey-based authentication layer as a drop-in replacement for the Matrix authorization server, swapping centralized email/phone login for WebAuthn passkey wallets and Sonr Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to enable passwordless, self-sovereign onboarding and cryptographic key exchange.
- Abstracted decentralized routing and cryptographic key management behind a Web2-grade chat UX, guiding frontend and product teams to deliver a frictionless messaging experience over fully decentralized identity and transport infrastructure.