Henri Binsztok's home page

About me

I live in 🇸🇬 and work on programming languages, machine learning, and software security. I co-founded OKcontract Labs, where we build tools for verifiable interfaces and safer operations using Ethereum.

I created Opa, a typed programming language for web applications that pioneered the JSX syntax, and founded MLstate, where we developed Opa and the end-to-end encryption platform PEPS. Wallix acquired MLstate, and I joined as Chief Innovation Officer. There, I led and/or participated in several European and French research projects in cybersecurity and encryption technologies, including ANBLIC (Fully Homomorphic Encryption and Functional Encryption), FENTEC (Functional Encryption) and OPTET (Static Analysis and Cybersecurity).

My doctoral research at the Sorbonne University LIP6 focused on the unsupervised learning of the structure of models for sequential data, with possible applications to handwriting and browsing sequences. I completed my PhD in 2007, supervised by Patrick Gallinari and Thierry Artières. I have also worked on formally verified parsing and co-authored the O'Reilly book Opa: Up and Running. I received the French Ministry of Innovation Grand Prix Award in 2007.

You can find me on GitHub, X, LinkedIn, and Medium.

Software

Some projects from OKcontract Labs:

Chainwall. Onchain approval and execution controls. Check an action’s permissions, parameters, and approvals at the point it runs.
Cells. Spreadsheet-inspired reactive state for the web, with asynchronous values, computed dependencies, and error propagation.
LambdaScript. A typed, reactive functional language for user-defined formulas, with type inference and exact rational arithmetic.

A few personal projects:

NanoAgent. A small TypeScript runtime for LLM agents, built around explicit state, single-step execution, and tool calls.
Rust Commander. A two-panel terminal file manager in Rust, inspired by Midnight Commander. Asynchronous operations and a keyboard-first workflow. In development with agentic assistance, or rather to prototype agentic assistance.
build. A single-file Lua build tool that reads build instructions directly from comments in your source files. Since, I have rewritten it in Zig and will try to release it soon.

Earlier notable work: Opa, a full-stack web programming language bringing client and server code into one typed language.

awless, a CLI for AWS in Go that provided reversible scripts and was based on our own implementation of RDF. This project received an InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software Award (link goes to article, not the award itself).

Writing

Book

Opa: Up and Running book cover Opa: Up and Running: Rapid and Secure Web Development.
With Adam Koprowski and Ida Swarczewskaja. O’Reilly, 2013.

Recent blog posts (manually maintained)

When Software Becomes Cheap, Trust Becomes Expensive (September 2026).
How AI changes the economics of open source and software supply-chain trust.
Guess What I’m Thinking! (May 2025).
A small experiment in LLM memory and tool use, written in TypeScript.

More writing on Medium.

Research & publications

TRX: A Formally Verified Parser Interpreter.
Adam Koprowski and Henri Binsztok. Logical Methods in Computer Science, 7(2), 2011. A parser interpreter for parsing expression grammars, with termination and correctness proved in Coq.
Apprentissage de Modèles Markoviens pour l’Analyse de Séquences.
Doctoral thesis, LIP6. Defended 14 September 2007. Learning Markov models for sequence analysis.
Learning Model Structure from Data: An Application to On-Line Handwriting.
Henri Binsztok and Thierry Artières, ELCVIA, 5(2), 30–46, 2005.
Learning HMM Structure for On-line Handwriting Modelization.
Henri Binsztok and Thierry Artières, IWFHR, 407–412, 2004.
A model-based approach to sequence clustering.
Henri Binsztok, Thierry Artières and Patrick Gallinari, ECAI, 420–424, 2004.
Partitionnement de tracés manuscrits en ligne par modèles Markoviens.
Henri Binsztok and Thierry Artières, CIFED, 217–222, 2004.
Un modèle probabiliste de détection en ligne de nouvel événement.
Henri Binsztok, Thierry Artières and Patrick Gallinari, RFIA, 2004.
Un algorithme en ligne pour la détection de nouveauté dans un flux de documents.
Henri Binsztok and Patrick Gallinari, JADT, 2002.

Talks & interviews

Cybersecurity in the Era of Frontier AI Models.
Singapore GUG meetup, 18 August 2026 (event announcement).
Risk Management for Digital Assets.
WAIB Summit, Monaco, Panel moderator, June 2026 (panel announcement).
AI agents transacting freely, under control.
EthCC[8], 3 July 2025 (video).
Smart contracts need more frontends.
EthCC[6], 20 July 2023 (video).
A conversation about creating Opa.
Regular Geek, 30 April 2012 (interview).