What I do
I am a Research & Development Engineer at Blockchain Lab:UM and COO and co-founder of Lutra Labs. Both roles are hands-on: I spend most of my time designing and shipping systems rather than managing from a distance. The through-line across everything I build is digital identity — proving who someone is, and what they are entitled to, without forcing them to hand over more than necessary.
In practice that means standards work turned into running software: OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance, ISO mDoc/mDL, W3C Verifiable Credentials and DIDs, and the wallet and issuer infrastructure that makes them usable. Alongside identity I work on DeFi protocols, developer tooling, and the operational plumbing that keeps all of it online.
Focus areas
Decentralized identity and verifiable credentials
Issuer, wallet, and verifier implementations built to the OID4VC family of specifications and ISO 18013-5/-7. This includes credential formats and selective disclosure, trust registries, and the unglamorous interoperability work of making one vendor’s wallet accept another vendor’s credential.
Web3 and protocol engineering
Smart contracts and protocol design in Solidity and Sway, including lending markets and reputation systems, plus the indexers, backends, and dashboards that surround them. I care about the parts that are hard to retrofit: upgrade paths, invariants, and failure behaviour under adversarial conditions.
Applied research and product
Turning research output into products people can run. Much of my work at Blockchain Lab:UM sits in EU-funded projects where the deliverable is a working reference implementation, and the interesting problem is the distance between a specification and a system that survives contact with real users.
How I work
- End to end. I would rather own a feature from the contract or protocol layer up to the interface than hand it across three teams.
- Security-minded by default. Threat modelling and key management are design inputs, not a review gate at the end.
- Standards first, then pragmatism. Interoperability is worth real effort; purity for its own sake is not.
- Written down. Architecture decisions, trade-offs, and the reasons behind them belong in the repository, not in someone’s memory.
Background
I hold a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, where I also completed my bachelor’s degree. I have been at Blockchain Lab:UM since 2021 and co-founded Lutra Labs in 2024. I work in Slovene and English, and read German.
Elsewhere
Code lives on GitHub. Selected work is written up on the projects page, and my full CV is available as a page and as a PDF. For anything else, see contact.