Matt Elder is a computer scientist and software engineer with a background in mathematics, program analysis, and distributed systems. He is the co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of the Reserve Protocol, where he led the technical design and implementation of its onchain financial infrastructure. ^[3]

Education

Elder graduated from the University of South Carolina with a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2006. He then attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he earned his MS in Computer Science in 2008. ^[1]​

Career

Elder began his career as a software engineer at the Industrial Mathematics Institute at the University of South Carolina, where he designed and implemented visualization tools for mathematical and chemical research, including software for editing molecular models in immersive CAVE environments. He then worked as a software engineer at netSweng, LLC, contributing to web-based infrastructure and standards compliance projects. His work included testing and improving a hosted webmail and website management platform, as well as designing and implementing application test suites for the Linux Standard Base, including tooling that interposed on C library calls to verify API and ABI compliance.

From 2006 to 2012, Elder served as a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he focused on abstract interpretation of machine code. He designed and implemented program analysis algorithms within industrial software analysis frameworks, developed formal correctness proofs, and contributed to peer-reviewed academic publications. He later joined Quixey as a research engineer, where he worked on systems for searching and retrieving content within mobile applications. His responsibilities included researching and architecting the Deep Search prototype, leading the prototype team, overseeing content acquisition systems in production, and supporting developer engagement initiatives.

Elder subsequently worked as a software engineer at Google, where he contributed to machine-learning-based anomaly detection systems for structured data in the Google Knowledge Graph. His role involved improving large-scale machine learning experimentation and designing, implementing, and refactoring components of the team’s machine learning infrastructure. From 2016 to 2017, he was a researcher at Paradigm Academy, where he conducted applied research related to blockchain and distributed systems. From 2017 to 2023, he served as Chief Technology Officer at Reserve, overseeing the technical development of the protocol and its supporting infrastructure, with a focus on system architecture, security, and the implementation of on-chain financial mechanisms. ^[2]

Presentations

Reserve Launch

In January 2023, Elder and Reserve Lead Developer Taylor Brent hosted the launch of the Reserve Protocol, during which Elder began by verifying the deployment environment. The deployment address held 8.27 ETH as they prepared to initiate transactions on the Ethereum proof-of-stake blockchain. High gas prices prompted a restart from a different account, and once sufficient ETH was confirmed, they proceeded with deploying the implementation contracts. This included the rollout of component contracts and asset plugins, such as Fiat collateral plugins, and the deployment of a DAI wrapper to convert the rebasing DAI token into a stable, exchange-rate-based token. By the end of the process, 18 asset and collateral plugins had been deployed, covering Fiat and crypto derivatives, and the governance system for the first R token was established, completing the key contracts for the protocol’s initial launch day. ^[4]