The Validian Protocol is built by a team of researchers, engineers, and visionaries dedicated to creating the next generation of cryptographic verification systems. Our diverse expertise spans cryptography, distributed systems, blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence.
Together, we're working to establish new standards for digital authenticity and trust in an era of synthetic media and AI-generated content.
Jon is the founding architect of the Validian Protocol. He began coding at age 11 through jailbreaks and system exploits, later gaining practical experience in renovation and excavation work, which helped bootstrap the early development of Validian. At 16, he co-founded and led finance, sales, and product design for an independent streetwear label. He went on to prototype the Validian system and formalized its foundational concepts in a series of papers, currently under peer review at Springer AI & Ethics.
Cledion is a mathematics student at ETH Zurich and recipient of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung), Germany's most selective academic scholarship. He also earned third prize in the 2024 Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik for excellence in advanced mathematical problem-solving. His background in competitive chess and poker sharpens his analytical and strategic approach to system design. As CTO, he leads the development of the core Validian Protocol architecture, focusing on cryptographic verification and decentralized infrastructure.
Alex leads AI systems at Validian, building intelligent infrastructure for decentralized verification and protocol automation. He is completing an MEng in Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Imperial College London. He has worked on agentic AI and vertical LLM systems with the UK Ministry of Justice, applying machine learning to structural problems in the justice system. At HP's Security Lab, he researched the vulnerabilities of generative AI models, built internal demonstrators, and published technical findings. He also developed conformal prediction frameworks in deep learning research at Royal Holloway. At Validian, Alex focuses on protocol-grade machine learning. His work powers metadata inference, model verification, and resilient AI logic across the stack.
Sairam holds a Master's degree in Cybersecurity from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. With a background as a full-stack software engineer, he brings practical experience across identity systems, cryptographic workflows, and infrastructure security. He has held engineering roles at Tenable, RootsID, and Concentrix Catalyst, where he worked on decentralized identity tooling, secure automation pipelines, and enterprise-grade web applications. His combined expertise in software engineering and cybersecurity informs the design of secure protocols within the Validian architecture.
We believe that trust and privacy represent the foundations of a functional society. As synthetic media becomes increasingly indistinguishable from reality and privacy continues to erode across digital spaces, the need for secure cryptographic verification and identity systems has never been more critical.
Our team is committed to building open, decentralized protocols that enable anyone, anywhere to verify the authenticity and origin of digital content while preserving privacy and enabling innovation. Our work combines cryptography, AI, and blockchain to create transparent systems where digital trust is treated as a public good.