john_camardo

John Camardo

VP of Product

12 years across crypto infrastructure, AI, and financial services. I ship, therefore I measure.

Product lead at Horizen Labs, where I run zkVerify and designed its tokenomics. Before that I led the founding-product work for Yuga Labs on the launch of ApeCoin — DAO, ERC-20 issuance, tokenomics spec, and the airdrop mechanics that put it in every major wallet on day one. Before crypto I spent seven years at Capital One running the commercial credit risk-rating platform under model risk management governance (SR 11-7) on a $65B portfolio. I build and ship with AI as a working partner.

▸ New York, New York
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Experience

Horizen Labs2021 – Present
New York, NY
Vice President, Product Management · 2025 – Present
  • Lead product management for zkVerify from testnet through mainnet deployment (September 2025). Now integrated with 5 chains, 9 proving systems, and 50+ external projects; 45M+ zero-knowledge proofs verified since genesis, at roughly 90% lower cost than L1 verification.
  • Designed the VFY tokenomics with Delphi Digital as consulting partner: supply, emissions, staking, and the proof-aggregation fee model. Led implementation of a 70% fee burn, which makes the network deflationary once fee revenue clears the 2.5% emission rate.
  • Chose native STARK verification (Risc0, SP1) over the market-default Groth16 — betting on post-quantum resistance.
  • Shipped UltraHonk support via runtime upgrade. Honk proofs generate client side and verification runs ~2.4M gas on EVM, roughly 6–7× Groth16.
  • Implemented an incentivized testnet strategy that deployed tokens at genesis to 10k+ participants.
  • Lead product manager for Vela, a confidential-compute layer on Horizen, and drove the open-source release to commercialize it for AI verification and private blockchain execution.
  • Lead product manager for an AI Agent Registry utilizing zero knowledge proofs that agents use to prove their work output to other humans and agents while keeping execution logs private.
Director of Product Management · 2024 – 2025
  • Co-originated zkVerify on the hypothesis that zk-rollups were paying 200,000–300,000 gas per proof on Ethereum L1, up to 100× a standard transfer. Made the case to the CEO to redirect the company from a crowded EVM market toward dedicated ZK verification.
  • Drove the strategic transition away from Horizen EON toward a dedicated L3 blockchain on top of Base
Senior Product Manager · 2022 – 2023
  • Led product for Horizen EON, an EVM-compatible sidechain productized from an in-house SDK, including ERC-20 token tooling and developer SDKs.
Product Manager · 2021 – 2022
  • Led the product work for the ApeCoin (APE) launch with Yuga Labs — co-designed the DAO, tokenomics, airdrop mechanics, and ERC-20 contract.
  • Drove product for the Horizen sidechain SDK, the developer toolkit that later became the foundation for EON.
Capital One2014 – 2021
New York, NY
Product Manager, Commercial Credit Solutions · 2019 – 2021
  • Owned Capital One's internal commercial credit risk-rating platform assigning probability-of-default and loss-given-default ratings to commercial borrowers across every industry the bank served — REITs, oil & gas E&P, and commercial real estate — supporting clients managing a $65B portfolio.
  • Won approval to re-platform the system from Java to Python, eliminating a manual model-translation layer in which quant-built Python models had to be hand-rewritten in Java for production.
Earlier roles · 2014 – 2019
  • Product Manager (2018–2019) partnering with data scientists, designers, and engineers to ship data products on big-data infrastructure; analytics for Retail Commercial Real Estate and E&P Companies.
  • Business Manager, Commercial Data & Digital Innovation (2017–2018), leading commercial data and digital work across Healthcare, Energy, Multifamily, and Retail real estate.
  • Senior Business Analyst (2015–2017) contributing to due diligence on the acquisition of the GE Healthcare Financial Services portfolio; Business Analyst (2014–2015) analyzing commercial real estate expansion with third-party property managers.

Education

Cornell University
B.S., Operations Research and Information Engineering
2010 — 2014

Skills

Crypto & ZK
ZK proof systemsSTARK / Groth16 / UltraHonkzkVM (Risc0, SP1)EVML1 / L2 / rollupsTokenomicsStakingGovernanceSmart contractsSubstrate / PolkadotWeb3DeFi
AI & Data
LLM applicationsAI agentsInferencePythonBayesian modelingMCMCSQLClaude Code

How I work

I design for the end state. I write the spec, the test, and the budget before the first line ships. I would rather ship a smaller thing in production than a larger thing on a slide.

I instrument what I build. Every system I own has a metric I check weekly. If a metric is below trend, I escalate it before the quarterly review. The public zkVerify fee dashboard I maintain is how I keep myself honest.

I use AI as a working partner. Claude Code is the primary tool in my loop — research, code review, debugging, writing — but I review every artifact and I'm the one who has to defend it. I have built applications with AI assistance that I could not have built alone in the same time, but I have not shipped anything I did not understand.

I keep score. I am most useful on teams that measure outcomes and act on what the data shows.

Selected Work

zkVerify Protocol Fee Dashboardzkverify-fee-dashboard-production.up.railway.app ↗

Live dashboard instrumenting the zkVerify network's fee and burn economics against a public Substrate Subsquid indexer. Tracks total fees, the 70% burn activation, net inflation rate, and progress to the deflation threshold, with methodology documented inline.

PythonSubstrateSubsquidProtocol Economics
Bayesian Forecasting Portfoliomajor-league-baseball.vercel.app ↗

Public forecasting models (baseball, basketball, soccer, MMA, tennis, World Cup, Kentucky Derby) built with hierarchical Bayesian models, MCMC, and walk-forward validation. Calibration against market-implied probabilities is documented in each app.

PythonBayesianMCMCHierarchical

Writing & Press