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Ecosystem Manager
Abdelhamid Bakhta is Head of Freedom Tech at StarkWare, a role he transitioned into after serving as Head of Ecosystem at the same company for three years. In his current capacity, his stated focus is on the question of how to verify what autonomous systems actually do, working on cryptographic proofs, governance tooling, and agent harness engineering for auditable autonomous systems. His work sits at the intersection of zero-knowledge proof technology and AI safety.
Prior to his current role, Bakhta led StarkWare's developer relations and growth efforts for the Starknet network. He was centrally involved in the STRK token airdrop in early 2024, serving as a primary public spokesperson in the aftermath of its contested rollout, acknowledging that criteria such as minimum wallet thresholds and the exclusion of certain users were miscalculated. During his tenure as Head of Ecosystem, he initiated the Kakarot and Madara open source projects, both of which subsequently became independently operated. He also led StarkWare's public positioning on extending ZK rollup technology to Bitcoin, including public commentary on the potential reactivation of the OP_CAT opcode and its implications for Bitcoin scalability. Before joining StarkWare, Bakhta worked as an Ethereum core developer and is co-author and technical champion of EIP-1559. He has 15 years of production software experience across payments, banking, and blockchain. He has appeared on the Bankless podcast to discuss Starknet's culture and development trajectory.
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