Nelson Ijih
Nelson Ijih

Nelson Ijih

nelson-ijih.jpg

Background

  • Yams & Peanuts - I spent the early years of my life farming and selling yams & peanuts with my mother in a small Nigerian village that was invaded by the Nigerian military and massacred hundreds of civilians. We were one of the lucky villagers to escape the massacre into the jungles.

  • FPGA for Data Center - I was one of the members of a small engineering team at Intel researching and developing FPGA-based computing server product which led to Intel acquiring Altera.

  • Blockchain & Distributed Systems - I co-founded BlockMint Technologies which is now publicly traded on Toronto stock exchange. We designed hardware accelerators(ASIC/FPGA) for the earlier Monero cryptographic hash function to build large scale Monero mining operation in Hillsboro,Oregon. One of the reasons for choosing to design a chip for the then Monero hashing algorithm was that the same chip would perform well with some AI Neural Network models for applications such as edge video analytics because of the heavy use of SRAMs and Multiplier-Accumulators in both applications. We also forked Brave browser to create Minter browser for a niche market and  filed a patent during this period on offline Blockchain transactions.

  • Community & Service - I have served as an Officer in U.S Intelligence community and have been teaching Cyber Security part-time at Portland Community College as a way to give back to America. Sometimes I tutor students across the U.S online .

  • Miscellaneous- I’m conversational in Russian language, speak Tiv and understand some Hausa. I have lived in Sweden, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Australia & Antarctica are the continents I've not visited. I once ran for the Republican nomination for U.S Congress in Oregon Congressional District 04 because I wanted to advocate for ending big money’s influence on U.S politics, cutting down 4-year bachelors degree into half, and enacting term-limits in U.S Congress and more.  No surprise that we lost to big money. We spent less than $5k and got 10k votes and the winner spent over $300k and got 70k votes. I was described as politically eclectic

  • I sometimes hang out on Twitter or LinkedIn or Quora. All my social links are on LinkTree:

  • E-mail:{ni at nelsonijih.com}