The team at Nexus is thrilled to welcome Riyaz Faizullabhoy as Vice President of Security.
From founding teams to scaling multi-billion dollar infrastructure platforms, Riyaz has consistently been at the helm of security strategy in the most demanding environments. He brings a defensive mindset and a systems-level approach to security — one that anticipates how complex architectures fail, and designs them to be resilient from the ground up.
Riyaz has spent his career navigating the intersection of technical nuance and the high-stakes environment of cryptographic systems and he’ll be applying that experience to the mission of enabling the Verifiable Internet.
Riyaz joins Nexus with a proven track record of building security architecture at the frontier of cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and web3 infrastructure. Most recently, he co-founded Bastion, a secure enterprise-grade platform for stablecoin and wallet management backed by a16z crypto.
Before founding Bastion, Riyaz was CTO at a16z crypto, where he helped portfolio companies operationalize security from day one. He supported portfolio companies across the entire spectrum of crypto (including zero knowledge technology, wallets, and protocols) with security programs, incident response strategies, internal token custody, and treasury management. He was also a founding member of the SEAL Security Alliance.
Prior to that, he served as a tech lead and architect for Novi (formerly Facebook’s Blockchain wallet) and led security efforts at Anchorage Digital as a founding engineer, the first federally chartered digital asset bank. Earlier in his career, Riyaz was a security engineer at Docker, where he helped design core container security primitives that underpin much of today’s cloud-native infrastructure.
His work contributed to the foundational tooling that developers use to build and run secure applications at scale, which is a skill set that translates directly into the secure system design challenges Nexus is tackling.
As VP of Security at Nexus, Riyaz will lead initiatives across system architecture, secure engineering practices, threat modeling, and formal verification to ensure that the Nexus stack and ecosystem are not only performant and extensible, but also safe.
Adding Riyaz to the team strengthens Nexus’ commitment to building a secure and scalable world supercomputer and zkVM. The team is incredibly fortunate to have someone of Riyaz’s caliber guiding the security strategy in a space where trust must be earned through code, math, and proof.
Welcome to Nexus, Riyaz.
Q&A with Riyaz
Why did you join Nexus?
“I believe in a trust but verify mentality. Verifiability is becoming the new foundation for trust on the internet. Nexus is leading that shift with the mission to enable the Verifiable Internet. Especially with the rise of AI, it has become increasingly important to ensure safety and security on the internet. Blindly trusting servers can no longer be the status quo, but trusting cryptography and zero-knowledge offer a new foundation to keep users safe. Nexus is leading that charge to enable an internet that we can not only trust, but verify.”
What interested you about the team?
“I knew after my first visit to the office that the Nexus team is uniquely special – an accomplished group of world-class experts in computer science, cryptography, and company-building all united by a powerful mission to enable verifiable computing for everyday use-cases.
It’s rare to find such a talent-dense, yet focused and driven organization. I knew I had to join! And I’m excited to build the security team here. We’re hiring and will be opening roles for the security team soon.”
What are you looking forward to doing here?
“I’m excited to design, build, and shepherd the security program for Nexus and our broader ecosystem.
At Nexus, we have an incredible opportunity to make the benefits of zero-knowledge cryptography accessible to everyone on the Internet – enabling verifiable computing so that sensitive and private operations stay secure. And very importantly, we have the opportunity to make this effortless: if we achieve our mission, all users on the Internet will be using verified computing without noticing any difference!
This is an ambitious, but well worthwhile goal to ensure the security and safety of the internet. I’m eager to rise to the challenge and build a next-level security program to support this at Nexus.”
What are your hobbies when you’re not focused on making the world more secure?
“When I’m not behind a keyboard, you might find me underwater – I’m an avid scuba diver with > 150 dives. I’m part way through becoming a divemaster, and my favorite dives so far have been in Northern California, Hawaii, and Malta.”