Selected, most recent first. Products and research in progress are described at yak.ad; this page is the longer arc.
Technical Architect. o1Labs is a client of Yak Software. Through that engagement I work on the technical architecture of o1Labs products and projects, and consult on execution and delivery across the engineering organisation.
Earlier, I spent five years working directly on Mina. I re-architected its networking layer around measured stability and performance work, and built the automated cluster-scale stress-testing process used before core releases.
A research paper, in draft. A consensus protocol built to be small: a fixed roster, a round-robin slot schedule and one density rule in place of votes, quorum certificates and view change. A non-specialist can follow it in a minute; it finalises deterministically and fast, and a light client needs to hold almost nothing.
The depth is in the threat analysis. Rotating a key, having a key extracted, and someone holding a key for a while are three separate events with different consequences, and each has a defined path back to safety. The light-client safety results are proved in Lean 4 — about fifteen thousand lines — against the Rust implementation.
Much of the proof search and iteration was done with AI agents, which became part of the research question rather than merely a productivity tool. Preprint and artifact.
My independent engineering and research company in Andorra.
Current work includes Diane, a dictation system built around several independent speech models and reconciliation between them; agent-cage, for running coding agents unattended without giving arbitrary executed code access to their credentials; Molt Petit; and Ledger, built on it — company records that stay correct and private even when an insider, human or AI, has access to every server.
yak.ad →At Serokell I was technical lead and chief architect on three projects commissioned by StakerDAO, as well as the main technical contact with the client. I handled planning and architecture and wrote a substantial part of the Haskell implementation.
The last project, StakerBridge, launched in March 2021 and supported swaps between Algorand, Ethereum and Tezos using a custom DoS-resilient variant of the usual token-swap protocol.
I led several blockchain projects in Haskell and OCaml.
Among them were Morley, a typed Haskell embedding of Tezos's Michelson, and Indigo, a more conventional language built on top of it. Much of the interesting work was in making Michelson's stack typing explicit enough that invalid programs could be rejected before they reached the chain.
I co-founded Pont.ee, a SaaS product built from tooling that had originally been developed internally at Serokell, and ran it as project manager rather than engineer: product definition, planning, and delivery to launch in July 2020.
I led the team that implemented Cardano SL from inception through its mainnet launch in September 2017. I was responsible for most of the development, quality and delivery across the ledger, consensus and networking work.
Before that, I spent a few intense months helping finish the Haskell implementation of RSCoin against its deadline.
I taught ITMO's functional-programming course, from basic Haskell through advanced type-level techniques. I tried to keep the course focused on using those ideas to build real software rather than treating the type system as an end in itself.
At Devexperts I first worked on back-office software for a UK forex broker, including a substantial re-architecture, and later on a derivatives-trading platform used by thousands of people.
Before that I was lead developer of a podcast platform serving roughly ten thousand downloads a day.
Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Applied Mathematics and Informatics from ITMO University, Saint Petersburg (2012–2018).
My master's thesis described a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency over a simple local key-value store and explored how delegation and stake-based voting could emerge from the underlying model rather than being added as separate protocol features.