devlog~
Systems engineering · protocols · developer tools
Hi, I'm Vadim. I build systems in Rust, mostly around blockchains, runtimes, and developer tools.
About
I joined Gear Protocol as its founding engineer in early 2021, working with founder Nikolay Volf to build the protocol before there was a team or a $12 million funding round.
For the next five years, I owned the Substrate dependency chain and core node infrastructure. In 2023, I led the testnet and mainnet launches of Vara Network, the first Layer 1 built on Gear Protocol, then led its ongoing network maintenance.
Now I build tools for AI agents on Vara: vara-wallet, a CLI wallet for on-chain operations, and vara-skills, a skill pack that teaches coding agents to build Sails programs without hallucinating the API.
Selected work
- Gear Protocol / Vara NetworkRust · Substrate
Substrate runtimes, WebAssembly execution, custom pallets, staking and validators, benchmarking, node infrastructure, mainnet operations, and repeated Polkadot SDK migrations.
- Vara.eth / ethexeRust · Ethereum
An Ethereum-connected execution system for Gear programs. I worked on networking, block synchronization, validator flows, announce recovery, execution infrastructure, and RPC surfaces.
- Gear DEXRust · CLOB
A central limit order book designed for persistent WASM programs and asynchronous messaging, with price-time priority, O(1) cancellation, vault flows, deterministic price indexes, and market infrastructure.
(not public) - SailsRust · IDL
A framework for Gear programs built around services, generated IDLs, and typed clients. I worked on the SDK, header-first decoding, client generation, and TypeScript integration.
- vara-skills / vara-walletAgents · TypeScript
Agent-facing tools for the Gear/Vara ecosystem: a portable Sails workflow and knowledge layer, plus a structured wallet and chain CLI with predictable errors, encrypted accounts, IDL discovery, and deployment.
Writing
Notes from systems work, experiments, and things I had to understand deeply enough to explain.
- 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.
Experiments
Small experiments in games, local models, inference runtimes, and agent workflows.