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Designed the first preconfirmations protocol, covering 20% of all blocks on Ethereum.
Now
Building the infrastructure for self-sovereign AI at Ritual.
Experience
Ritual · Core Protocol Engineer (1 of 2)
2025–Present
Polychain-backed Layer 1 for autonomous intelligence.
- Built verifiable compute by leveraging hardware cryptography (TEEs): LLM forward passes, network interactions, and arbitrary long-duration workloads, including fully homomorphic encryption over transformer-based inference (MOAI).
- Co-designed Sequencing Rights, a consensus mechanism letting applications set their own transaction-ordering rules (e.g., cancels execute first), built to stay incentive-compatible across competing, adversarial stakeholders.
- Reduced complex feature sets to a minimal core of sound, well-hardened primitives, shrinking the security-critical surface, and bounded adversarial paths with validity constraints that limit what any malicious validator or participant can do.
- Bounded tail-latency (P99) behavior of the network through large-scale simulations across 50+ geo-distributed nodes.
- Designed the gas pricing for AI compute (token-metered LLM fees, FLOP-based ML cost estimation) so the chain charges correctly for inference.
Primev · Founding Engineer (Employee #1)
2023–2025
a16z-backed Ethereum infrastructure: mev-commit, a preconfirmations protocol.
- Designed and shipped the first end-to-end MEV preconfirmations protocol (slashing, oracle settlement, rewards, and commitment storage) to Ethereum mainnet, integrating with Titan and bloXroute: the builder and relay infrastructure behind roughly half of all Ethereum blocks.
- Core participant in Ethereum Foundation working groups, leading preconfirmation discussions in Berlin and contributing to account-abstraction discussions in London.
- Made mev-commit the first network to activate live slashing on Symbiotic mainnet and shipped an EigenLayer AVS; led security and hardened L1 contracts through a Cantina audit competition ($65K pool).
Education
University of Waterloo · BCS Honours, Computer Science (ML & Security)
2015–2020
Wilfrid Laurier University · BBA Honours, Business
2015–2020
Joint Waterloo–Laurier Double Degree (Computer Science + Business).
Additional Experience
KOHO · early engineer on the in-house crypto-trading product; on track to be Canada’s first Schedule 1 neobank
2021–2023
Emergent Reputation · founder: decentralized-reputation whitepaper with a proxy re-encryption mechanism
2022
Nearby · first role out of school, with founder April Underwood (first CPO of Slack); local commerce as the alternative to Amazon; $21M Series A
2020
ISARA Corporation · quantum-resistant certificate authority in Go (post-quantum PKI)
co-op
Communication Security Establishment · Canada's signals-intelligence agency
co-op
GTAN / Laurier Startup Fund · venture analyst, due diligence
apprenticeship
On AI
I build with frontier models from an understanding of how they are trained and what their representations can carry: constraining them with well-formed objective functions and verifiable loops, and pushing work toward non-interactive, parallelizable pipelines rather than leaning on a model’s RL to recover an underspecified prompt.