I'm Vitalis Salis. I deal with LLMs, security, and distributed systems. These days I am getting into AI research, especially AI security, red-teaming and alignment.
I am the CTO of Babylon Labs. I joined in 2022 as the first engineer and grew the engineering team to 25 people. Together we shipped the Bitcoin staking protocol, which attracted more than 100,000 BTC, and Babylon Genesis, the first proof-of-stake chain secured by Bitcoin. We now build Trustless Bitcoin Vaults, which let Bitcoin holders use native BTC as collateral in DeFi applications, starting with Aave v4.
I build and use LLM-enhanced security pipelines that detect, verify and patch vulnerabilities in source code of any kind. These pipelines have been used extensively and have discovered several vulnerabilities in distributed systems. I am also a white-hat hacker: I have found zero-day vulnerabilities in production systems and received bug bounties from Cosmos and Succinct, among others.
Before Babylon, I was a researcher at the Athens University of Economics and Business, where I worked on static program analysis. I created PyCG, a widely adopted call graph generator for Python (ICSE 2021), and published research on Git repository analysis and JavaScript code evolution. Earlier, I was a software and infrastructure engineer at GRNET. I studied electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens.
Outside of work, I enjoy running, the mountains, and the occasional sauna and cold plunge.