About Kate Sills

Kate lives in the mountains near Sonora, CA on a few acres. She's about two hours away from the Bay Area and likes it that way.

Kate is the leader of the Sonora Writers Group and enjoys writing short stories, gardening, line dancing, paddleboarding, and hiking with friends.

In June 2022, Kate started a consulting business. She has taught object-capability programming and designed image verification architecture and decentralized identity solutions. More on Kate's consulting here.

In 2018, Kate was the first hire at a startup called Agoric. Agoric was founded by pioneers in computer security, distributed systems, and computational law, who authored pieces such as Computer Security as the Future of Law (1997), Capability-based Financial Instruments (2001), and The Digital Path (2003).

At Agoric, Kate proved herself a capable software engineer and built Agoric's smart contract framework layer, called Zoe. Zoe allows users to design and create their own digital assets, and exchange them securely in a variety of ways, including auctions, financial options, decentralized exchanges. Unlike other smart contract platforms, Zoe manages the escrow of digital assets, allowing users to securely experiment with custom code written by others, knowing that their assets are still safe even if the custom code has a bug.

In 2015 and 2016, Kate built a tiny house herself, learning construction from YouTube. The tiny house currently rests on her parents' organic farm north of Sacramento.

Kate graduated from UC Berkeley in 2012. She double-majored in Computer Science and Cognitive Science.