devlog~
Founding engineer at Gear Protocol. In early 2021 I started building it from scratch alongside its founder Nikolay Volf — before the team, before the $12M raise, and before the world knew what it was.
For the next two years I owned the Substrate dependency chain and core node infrastructure. In 2023 I led the deployment of Vara Network (testnet & mainnet) — the first Layer-1 built on Gear Protocol. I've been leading network maintenance ever since.
Lately I'm building tooling for AI agents on Vara: a CLI wallet and a skill pack that teaches coding agents how to build Sails programs without hallucinating the API — and operate natively inside the network as full-featured users.
Projects
Founding Engineer — Infrastructure & Runtime
Led the testnet and mainnet launch (Sept 2023). I manage the technical lifecycle: architecture, runtime upgrades, and deployment pipelines.
→ wiki.vara.network- Gear ProtocolRust
Founding Engineer — Built from zero (2021)
Substrate-based smart contract platform for WebAssembly programs. Built the core protocol alongside Nikolay Volf, pre-investment. Owned the Substrate dependency chain, WASM execution, and runtime stability through the Polkadot SDK transition.
→ gear-tech/gear - AI Agent Tooling
Building the agentic-web stack on Vara.
- vara-skillsSkills
Portable skill pack for LLM coding agents. Covers the full Gear/Vara Sails workflow — spec to deployment. Ships as a Claude Code plugin, Codex skill, and OpenClaw wrapper.
→ gear-foundation/vara-skills - vara-walletTypeScript
CLI wallet for AI agents on Vara. Structured JSON output, encrypted key management, and on-chain program interaction — built for autonomous agent-to-agent workflows.
→ gear-foundation/vara-wallet
Writing
- Do Looped Transformers Generalize? A Three-Day, Five-Task Test
What happened when I spent three days testing looped-Transformer length generalization across five algorithmic tasks on an M4 Max.
- Building a Vara DApp with Hermes Agent — From Spec to Mainnet
How I set up a Hermes agent, installed vara-skills and vara-wallet, and built a full dApp from scratch — smart contract, tests, CLI client, and a new frontend.
- From Opaque Bytes to Universal Services: Introducing Sails Header v1
How a 16-byte header transforms opaque SCALE payloads into self-describing service calls — and why that lets wallets render UIs instantly and indexers query the whole network by type.