Jack Xu

Biography

Jack Xu is an Adjunct Lecturer of Information Technology Practice who exclusively focuses on blockchain technology. After receiving his Master's degree in Computer Science in December 2021, he dove head-first into the Blockchain minor and completely revamped ITP-356, the only Solidity programming course at USC, which he's lectured since Spring 2022. He has also taught ITP-456: Blockchain Capstone since Spring 2023.

During his time as a student at USC, Jack has worked as the Course Producer / Teaching Assistant for a variety of classes in Computer Science and Information Technology Program, including CSCI-201: OOP in Java, ITP-116: Intro to Python, ITP-256: Intro to Blockchain, ITP-342: Intro to iOS, and ITP-344: Advanced iOS. Aside from responsibilities at school, he is also the co-founder and Tech Lead™ of EthSign, a suite of decentralized consent-capture applications built on various EVM blockchains. EthSign is proudly backed by Sequoia India & US, Mirana Ventures, Hack VC, Circle Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal, and other top-tier investors. Jack also received the Outstanding Student Service Award from the Computer Science department in May 2020 and to this day he still has no idea how it happened, why it happened, or which faculty member nominated him.

Jack got into the blockchain world by buying high, holding low, and losing a good chunk of money in early 2018. However, he truly "stayed for the tech" and decided to look into how he could program on the blockchain, more specifically Ethereum. After joining an online bootcamp in mid-2019 and spending a couple of months getting his programming self-esteem tremendously obliterated like never before by his French mentor, Xavier Leprête, he emerged on the other side victorious and began to work on his own Solidity projects, one of which would eventually become EthSign.

Fun fact: Jack transferred into USC as a spring admit during his sophomore year. Prior to joining USC, he studied Digital Arts & Visual Effects at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in Chapman University. While his life drawing and visual storytelling skills were so embarrassingly bad that it was borderline criminal, his 3D modeling, lighting, and rendering skills were quite impressive. This helped him understand that he was a lot more technical than artsy, which was further proven when he took an introductory Python class. He then decided to transfer to USC and the rest is history.

He also wrote this whole thing in third person, and he thinks this is really weird.