When in-house teams stall on consensus, ZK, DeFi mechanism work, or DeAI infrastructure, we step in and finish the engineering.
We come in when an in-house team has built what it can build and the remaining work needs senior, domain-specific engineering — consensus design, ZK circuits, cross-chain mechanism work, decentralized AI infrastructure. The missing piece is engineering depth, not engineering hours. We've contributed cryptography to Wormhole and Proof-of-Compute engineering to Gonka, designed L1 consensus at genesis for a chain now on mainnet, and build decentralized AI networks end to end.
Engagements where we owned a hard, specialized slice of the engineering — not everything, but the parts no one else on the team could ship.
This isn't a service menu. It's the engineering depth we own. Most engagements draw from two or three of these at once.
When the chain has to ship to mainnet with custom consensus, native protocol-level features, or institutional-grade indexing. Two L1s shipped — Incentiv's Contribution-Scored PoW from genesis, one under NDA. Indexer infrastructure for Canton Network. Mawari's L3 chain, Guardian node stack, and staking portal (mainnet live).
→ /capabilities/l1-l2When the protocol needs ZK circuits, light clients, or privacy primitives the in-house team can't ship alone. Wormhole Foundation contributor — NEAR↔ETH ZK light client; built the Solana implementation of MultiGov (multichain governance). Cryptography work for zkSync. Open-source contributions to Penumbra. Research on ZK proof systems and Merkle tree cryptography — five peer-reviewed papers (MDPI Cryptography, IEEE Access, Elsevier, Springer).
→ /capabilities/zk-cryptoWhen the network needs Proof-of-Compute consensus, inference verification, or DeAI agent infrastructure. Y.AI, built end to end. Contributor to Gonka's $50M Bitfury-backed compute network.
→ /capabilities/deaiWhen the protocol needs the whole mechanism — not just contracts, but the math, the cross-chain plumbing, and the issuance design. Stablecoin engineering for institutional issuers (M0). Multi-chain RWA stablecoins (Evidentia). Five lending protocols across six chains.
→ /capabilities/defiSeparate from client takeovers. Foundation grants, contracted protocol engineering, and open-source — public-infrastructure work.
Cryptography contributor on the NEAR↔Ethereum ZK light client; built the Solana implementation of MultiGov, Wormhole's multichain governance system. Protocol-level work in production.
CONTRIBUTOREngineering contributor to Proof-of-Compute consensus on Gonka's Bitfury-backed compute network. Public contribution, ongoing.
OSSOpen-source contributions to a privacy-preserving DEX protocol. Cryptography and tooling.
Engagements run in four stages. Every engagement starts with a 30-minute call with one of the founders. No SDR layer. No proposal-team relay.
We work embedded with your team. Joint architecture decisions, code review, deploy-day support. The engagement runs through your team's standards, not parallel to them.
30 senior engineers across L1, ZK, DeFi, and DeAI. Distributed across six European countries — UK, Portugal, Poland, Estonia, Ukraine, Italy.
Zpoken is AI-native. Engagements run against an internal arsenal of AI agents — code generation, verification harnesses, chain-specific tooling — built and maintained by the same engineers who ship the work. The model layer is mixed by design: Claude for frontier models, open-source models self-hosted on GPUs we own for work that can't touch a third-party API. Agents draft and check; engineers answer for what ships.
Mike runs the firm. Anton runs engineering. Both have been building in crypto since Zpoken was founded in 2017. Every engagement above runs through one of them.
Founded Zpoken in 2017 and has run it as CEO ever since — nine years, founder-led. The team takes over the hardest parts of a crypto build — consensus, ZK, DeFi mechanism, DeAI infrastructure — for protocols whose in-house teams can't ship those alone. An engineer by background; current focus is the onchain economy and payments. Contributes to Evidentia.fi. Angel investor across agentic commerce, decentralized AI, PayFi, and DeFi.
Co-founded Zpoken with Mike in 2017 and serves as CTO. Runs the applied-cryptography and distributed-systems side of the practice — consensus design, ZK light clients, and protocol-level cryptography — and architected Incentiv's Contribution-Scored Proof-of-Work consensus from the genesis block. Researcher and angel investor in the same domains.
Every engagement runs through Mike or Anton.
Engagements run in three shapes, decided after the intro call. Discovery is unbilled; billing starts at contract. Shapes and terms → /engagement