Hi, I'm Darya! I am a Research & Development Engineer at UC Berkeley Sky Lab, advised by Professor Raluca Ada Popa. My interests lie in combining cryptographic primitives and security-conscious networking to build secure distributed trust systems. I aim to devise systems that enforce transparency and accessibility for communities while preserving privacy and agency for individual users.

I completed my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and minor in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where I was President of Blockchain at Berkeley and conducted research in Professor Niloufar Salehi's lab. In past lives, I was a Smart Contract Engineer & Researcher at Opyn and a Software Engineering Intern on Meta's Community Help Team.

Publications & Posters

Developing & Deploying Distributed Trust
Darya Kaviani*, Sijun Tan*, Raluca Ada Popa
Sky Lab Retreat Winter 2023

Bridging Action Frames: Instagram Infographics in U.S. Ethnic Movements
Darya Kaviani, Niloufar Salehi
ACM CSCW 2022

Select Projects

zkPoll

An anonymous polling application that uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify group membership. Semaphore circuits are integrated with ECDSA to allow Ethereum users to use their ETH identity as their Semaphore identity.

Satchel

A decentralized application that banks underbanked school communities by facilitating locally-governed projects and bootstrapping capital through DeFi-powered donations and financial primitives.

Bull Strategy

A short-volatility decentralized finance strategy that enables users to earn returns on ETH even in a downturning market by splitting ETH deposits between a delta-neutral strategy and levering up via a lending protocol.

Writivist

A mobile application that streamlines contacting elected officials to make civic involvement accessible and effortless. Includes a Template Library, a find my representatives map, and robust email automation.