Yannik Schrade is a German pc scientist and cryptographer finest generally known as the co-founder and CEO of Arcium, a decentralized confidential computing community constructed on safe multi-party computation. He co-invented the Cerberus MPC protocol and beforehand constructed shiftscreen, an iOS productiveness app that ranked among the many Apple App Retailer’s high sellers.
Who Is Yannik Schrade?
Yannik Schrade is a German pc scientist, cryptographer, and entrepreneur. He studied Regulation at Heidelberg College from 2018 to 2020 earlier than switching to Pc Science and Arithmetic on the Technical College of Munich beginning in 2020. He enrolled in that program by way of 2024 however dropped out in 2022 after co-founding Arcium, selecting to dedicate himself totally to the corporate reasonably than full his diploma. Yow will discover profiles of different builders shaping the Web3 business on our crypto personalities web page.
Little public info exists about his private life past his skilled work. He has referenced George Orwell’s 1984 in discussions of privateness and surveillance and lists Friedrich Nietzsche’s Past Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra amongst his favourite readings. Outdoors his work in cryptography, Schrade is concerned in wildlife administration and conservation, together with rescuing and rehabilitating animals.
Yannik Schrade’s Profession and Contributions
Earlier than Arcium, Schrade based shiftscreen in February 2020, an iOS app that allow customers join an iPad or iPhone to an exterior show and use it as a second display screen for productiveness work. The app supported a number of home windows, together with net browsers and PDF viewers, and later expanded by way of an replace known as Shiftscreen 4X. It reached over 100,000 paying customers in additional than 130 international locations, turned a top-selling app on the Apple App Retailer throughout its lively interval, and was featured by The Wall Avenue Journal (WSJ) as a “must-have app.” Schrade ran shiftscreen till January 2022.
In 2022, Schrade co-founded what turned Arcium, initially launched as Elusiv and centered on zero-knowledge (ZK) privateness tooling earlier than rebranding to Arcium in Might 2024. He co-founded the corporate alongside Nico Schapeler as CTO, Julian Deschler as CSO, and Lukas Steiner as COO. Schapeler leads cryptography analysis and protocol implementation, constructing on prior expertise with the Elusiv privateness utility. Deschler directs strategic development in decentralized applied sciences, and Steiner oversees operations, finance, and recruiting.
Schrade has additionally co-founded ZKurve AG, a separate enterprise, which he continues to run alongside Arcium.
Arcium describes itself as constructing the encrypted execution engine of the web, aiming to allow privacy-preserving functions with out sacrificing efficiency or decentralization. The corporate has raised greater than $15 million from buyers and assembled a workforce of cryptographers and engineers to construct out its confidential computing community. Arcium has additionally acquired Inpher, an organization centered on privacy-preserving computation, additional increasing its technical base.
Yannik Schrade’s Technical Contributions
Schrade’s cryptographic work facilities on safe multi-party computation, or MPC, and its utility to confidential computing. He’s the co-author and inventor of the Cerberus MPC protocol, described as the primary sensible, general-purpose dishonest-majority MPC protocol with safety below identifiable abort, which means it could actually establish cheaters even in trustless, decentralized settings. Cerberus kinds a core piece of the broader Arcium protocol.
In August 2025, Schrade formalized what he calls the MPC Scaling Regulation, a bandwidth-growth heuristic for safe multi-party computation protocols impressed by Nielsen’s Regulation of Web Bandwidth. The heuristic classifies MPC protocols as both latency-constrained or bandwidth-constrained and predicts that bandwidth-constrained pairwise MPC designs, resembling Cerberus, grow to be roughly 33% quicker per spherical every year as web bandwidth grows, till propagation delay turns into the limiting issue. He has not but printed a full paper on this heuristic and has stated it nonetheless wants to include Moore’s Regulation for native operations and account for lattice-based protocols.
Schrade can also be the creator of w25519, an open-source cryptographic library applied in Rust that gives Brief-Weierstrass curve operations on an isomorphic illustration of Curve25519. The library allows extra environment friendly elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key alternate inside rank-1 constraint methods, a format generally utilized in zero-knowledge proof development.
Yannik Schrade’s Views and Positions
Schrade describes privateness as “a very powerful freedom proper of the twenty first century and past,” arguing that as extra of life shifts into digital methods, sturdy encryption turns into a requirement reasonably than an choice. He has framed privacy-preserving expertise as important not only for particular person rights however for nationwide safety, resilient digital infrastructure, and protected AI improvement. He has stated privateness ought to by no means come at the price of usability, arguing that privateness instruments that restrict performance will fail to search out adoption.
He usually speaks at business conferences, together with Solana Breakpoint, EthCC, and Token2049, and has appeared on the Tucker Carlson Present to debate encryption and surveillance.
A lot of his public commentary connects to the Solana ecosystem, the place Arcium builds its confidential computing infrastructure. Readers new to that ecosystem can discover the fundamentals in our information on whether or not Solana is an efficient funding.
Steadily Requested Questions
Want a refresher? Listed below are the questions readers most frequently ask about Yannik Schrade.
Who’s Yannik Schrade?
Yannik Schrade is a German pc scientist and cryptographer generally known as the co-founder and CEO of Arcium, a decentralized confidential computing community. He beforehand based shiftscreen, a productiveness app that ranked among the many high sellers on the Apple App Retailer, earlier than dropping out of college in 2022 to construct Arcium full time.
What’s Arcium?
Arcium is a decentralized confidential computing community that makes use of safe multi-party computation to permit computations on encrypted knowledge with out decrypting it. Yannik Schrade co-founded the corporate in 2022 as Elusiv, and it rebranded as Arcium in Might 2024. The corporate has raised greater than $15 million from buyers and describes its purpose as constructing the web’s encrypted execution engine.
What’s the Cerberus MPC protocol?
Cerberus is a safe multi-party computation protocol co-invented by Yannik Schrade, described as the primary sensible, general-purpose dishonest-majority MPC protocol with safety below identifiable abort. That property allows the protocol to detect dishonest members even in trustless, decentralized environments and is a core part of Arcium’s broader protocol.
What did Yannik Schrade construct earlier than Arcium?
Earlier than Arcium, Schrade based shiftscreen in February 2020, an iOS app that allow customers join an iPad or iPhone to an exterior monitor for productiveness work. The app reached over 100,000 paying customers in additional than 130 international locations and was acknowledged by The Wall Avenue Journal as a “must-have app” earlier than Schrade based Arcium in 2022.
Did Yannik Schrade end his college diploma?
Schrade didn’t end his college diploma. He studied Regulation at Heidelberg College from 2018 to 2020, then switched to Pc Science and Arithmetic on the Technical College of Munich beginning in 2020. He dropped out of that program in 2022 after co-founding what would grow to be Arcium, selecting to give attention to the corporate full-time as an alternative of finishing his diploma.