# The Alephium team The project is spearheaded by Cheng Wang and Maud Bannwart, both of whom play crucial roles in its development. Cheng Wang, the founder and core developer, is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Initially pursuing two PhDs—one in number theory and the other in distributed algorithms—Cheng shifted his focus to blockchain technology upon discovering consensus algorithms. This pivot led to the creation of Alephium, a project aimed at addressing scalability and security challenges in blockchain. Maud Bannwart, the Chief Operations Officer of Alephium, is based in Zurich, Switzerland. She studied chemical engineering at EPFL and economics at the University of Lausanne. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.ralphbuilder.org/what-is-alephium-alph/the-alephium-team.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.