El País Newspaper Just Profiled Our CTO: Attending Black Hat USA This August

In August, Ledge co-founder and CTO Diego Silveira will walk into a series of private meetings with Microsoft at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, one of the most important cybersecurity conferences in the world. The invitation came after several responsible vulnerability disclosures he filed this year as an independent security researcher. Details of those findings stay confidential, standard practice for responsible disclosure. The path that got him there doesn't.

A refuge, not a hobby

Diego grew up in Artigas, in northern Uruguay. He was 9 when his mother died. His father was absent, his grandmother raised him, and resources were limited. In that context, he found something other kids his age weren't looking for: a computer.

"My childhood started fine until my mom passed away. That's when things got hard, and I found refuge in computers," he recalls. He didn't own one. He spent hours on a borrowed machine at his aunt's house, treating it like a door to somewhere else.

The door opened wider when a cousin who worked in computer engineering showed him a few tools. "It was like watching a magic trick," Diego says. He went home with the names of those programs memorized and an obsession that stuck. No courses. No teachers. No community that shared the interest. He taught himself programming, technical English, and security concepts by reading forums and documentation, alone, for years.

It cost him socially. In the early 2000s, spending all day at a screen wasn't seen as a career path. "Not wanting to be seen as a nerd, as that person who spent all day on the computer, became part of my identity," he admits. He tried to walk away from it more than once. The curiosity always pulled him back.

The report that changed his career

At 21, Diego left Artigas for Universidad Tecnológica (UTEC) in Durazno. He lasted a semester and a half before landing his first job as a software developer. Not long after, he decided to test his own skills against one of his employer's products. He found a vulnerability and reported it internally. The response was immediate: "They told me, 'we're moving you to another team.'"

That single report redirected his career from traditional development toward cybersecurity, infrastructure, and critical systems. Three years later, a US company hired him. He started as a Site Reliability Engineer, was promoted to DevOps Manager, and is now moving into security and infrastructure leadership, the same track that eventually brought him to Ledge as co-founder and CTO. Through all of it, he kept researching on his own time.

This year, that independent research paid off. Multiple responsible disclosures caught Microsoft's attention, and an unexpected email followed. "When I saw the invitation, I was thrilled," Diego says. "I'm excited to see what they're working on and meet people with different perspectives and skills."

Why "ethical" is the word that matters

Diego is careful about language. "When I use the word hacking, I try to pair it with 'ethical.' It's still a term that carries a lot of stigma," he says. That distinction, between security research and crime, isn't a footnote for him. It's the point. He sees technology as a path of social mobility for kids growing up the way he did: "More and more people from low-income backgrounds will be able to chart an alternative path out of that environment, thanks to technology."

What it means for Ledge

Ledge is built on a simple premise: a compliance passport that financial institutions can trust because it's cryptographically verifiable, not because someone says so. That only works if the person architecting the cryptography has real adversarial instincts, the kind you get from years of trying to break systems before someone with worse intentions does.

Diego's invitation to Black Hat didn't come from a simple pitch. It came from Microsoft validating work he did on his own, outside of Ledge, testing some of the largest systems in the world. That's the same rigor now going into Ledge's cryptographic foundation.

In a few weeks, he'll walk through the halls where some of the top security minds on the planet gather. The curiosity that started in a small room in Artigas got him there.

Based on reporting by Manuella Sampaio, "De Artigas a Las Vegas: el uruguayo que aprendió hacking de niño y hoy llega a la cumbre de la ciberseguridad," El País (Uruguay), June 29, 2026.