DeFi Protocol Architect & Strategic Advisor

I architect systems where
failure means immediate financial loss.

23 years bridging Tier-1 finance risk management and bleeding-edge EVM/SVM infrastructure. I help founders, DAOs, and Web3 funds ship capital-efficient, exploit-resistant protocols — before mainnet, not after the post-mortem.

Code is a commodity. Judgment is a career.

23 yrs
Finance & systems engineering
$1B+
TVL secured in production
5 books
Published on Rust & Zig
EVM×SVM
Native interop at Neon Labs
Work with me

Two ways to put architectural judgment on your side

Both are the same product — decades of compounded judgment — packaged as either a fixed-scope engagement or an ongoing partnership.

Ongoing

Strategic / Fractional CTO Advisory

The technical anchor for founding teams strong on vision but light on high-stakes execution. I guide technology selection, decentralization phasing, and the architecture decisions that institutional partners and VCs scrutinize.

  • Weekly strategic review & roadmap validation
  • Whitepaper and protocol-design formulation
  • Interface with VCs, auditors & institutional partners
  • Retainer + token/equity warrant
Monthly retainer · limited concurrent engagements
Where I go deep

Low-level systems where latency is microseconds and security is absolute

Protocol Architecture

End-to-end strategy, consensus-mechanism design, and cross-chain execution models.

EVM / SVM Infrastructure

Bridging fundamentally different virtual machines, same-slot execution logic, and complex state management.

MEV & Yield Optimization

LST/LRT architectures that systematically capture and redistribute blockspace value to stakers.

Applied Cryptography

Zero-knowledge proof integration (zkSNARKs, circom) for privacy-preserving institutional systems.

Proof of judgment

I write about the exact vectors I engineer against

Teardowns of real failures, with the architecture that should have prevented them.

Architecture teardown

The $292M Kelp DAO Hack: Why the Default Is the Architecture

Not a smart-contract bug — a single-verifier default that diffused responsibility across a trust boundary, and the guardrails that should have caught it.

Read the teardown →
Background

The intersection is the moat

Most engineers know how to make code work. Far fewer have stood in a Tier-1 bank's risk function and an on-chain protocol's solvency engine, and understood that they are the same problem wearing different clothes.

I've spent 23 years bridging traditional-finance risk management at Credit Suisse, UBS, and HSBC with bleeding-edge Web3 infrastructure — most recently architecting the execution layer that lets Ethereum's ecosystem run natively inside the Solana SVM at Neon Labs, and building DeFi protocols that have secured $1B+ in TVL.

Beyond engineering, I publish: 5 books on Rust and Zig, the Rust Guru newsletter (2,900+ engineers), and rustlab.dev.

Get in touch

Bring me in before the launch, not after the exploit

For a fixed-fee architecture & risk audit, or to discuss an advisory partnership.