DeFi · Execution2025
Intent router with MEV‑aware settlement
We replaced a legacy order‑router with a solver‑driven intent system. Same UX, 23% better fills.
RustFoundryFlashbotsSUAVE
+23%
Execution quality
38 ms
p50 latency
0.04%
Revert rate
Building the future
We automate
complexity.
You reclaim life.
BlockZenith is an R&D and product house building at the edge of frontier finance and agentic AI. We design DeFi protocols, ship DeFAI agents that execute policy on‑chain, and build LLM systems that actually stay in production.
Founded2020 · Class ’17 builders
Shipped$1.4B+ TVL · 60+ agents
PresenceRemote · Berlin · Lisbon · SG
Trusted by2020 – 2026
·HELIOS·NORDLINE·AXIOMA·KUROSHIO·VERTIGO·SILVA·MERIDIAN·OCTET·NOVA BANK·PRIMEFABRIC·CIRCUIT·TERRAFORM
·HELIOS·NORDLINE·AXIOMA·KUROSHIO·VERTIGO·SILVA·MERIDIAN·OCTET·NOVA BANK·PRIMEFABRIC·CIRCUIT·TERRAFORM
What we do
Four surfaces. One operating principle: automate the boring.
Our labs ship both as products and as engagements. Everything we deliver is audit‑ready, replayable, and built to outlast the hype cycle.
Lab 03
Protocol engineering
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, and L2 rollups — core code, pallets, precompiles, bridges.
Learn more
Lab 01
DeFi & DeFAI
Audited contracts, autonomous vaults, MEV‑aware execution, guardian circuits.
Learn more
Lab 02
Agentic AI
Multi‑agent systems that stay aligned, in budget, and on task — across long horizons.
Learn more
Lab 05
Secure infrastructure
HSM‑backed signers, attested builds, SLSA‑3 provenance, eBPF observability.
Learn more
Inside the Zenith
Five labs, one codebase.
Each lab ships open‑source primitives and an internal product. They share tooling, infra, and post‑mortems.
Engagements
Ship with us.
Four practices. Fixed‑price week‑zero scoping. Long engagements with small teams.
Engineering principles
Six rules. Checked on every PR.
We write these on the office wall and the commit hook. They quietly shape every decision we make, from protocol choices to agent policies.
zenith@blockzenith:~secure
zenith~$
01
Audited by default
Every contract, signer path and agent policy ships with attestations.
02
Reproducible builds
If a commit hash cannot build the same artifact twice, we do not ship it.
03
Privacy on the wire
Client data never traverses a third‑party inference tenancy.
04
Replayable logs
Every autonomous decision can be re‑run offline with the same output.
05
Human circuit breakers
Operators can pause, freeze, or rewind an agent at any block.
06
Open source, on purpose
We open the parts the market deserves; we sell judgment, not secrets.
Selected work
Where our code meets capital.
DeFAI · Asset mgmt2024
Autonomous vault platform with guardian circuits
Self‑custodial vaults that rebalance autonomously. Guardian circuits suspend strategies on regime change in under 1 block.
SolidityPythonNautilusEigenLayer
$410M
TVL
+6.1%
APY delta vs. bench
0
Drawdown events
Agentic AI · Ops2025
Operations agent for tier‑1 support
A role‑typed agent graph ingesting tickets, graph data and ledger state. Audit trail is the product.
Claude 4LangGraphPostgresOpenTelemetry
71%
Ticket deflection
+14 pts
CSAT
< 0.3%
Hallucination rate
Protocol · L12024
Cross‑chain asset pallet with XCMv3
Authored a production pallet and XCM extension enabling permissioned RWA transfers across the relay.
RustSubstrateXCMv3
39%
Gas saved
28k
Lines of Rust
0 critical
Audit findings
Protocol · BTC2023
Bitcoin signet fuzz harness
A deterministic fuzzing harness targeting Bitcoin Core script interpreter. Upstreamed.
C++libFuzzerBitcoin Core
6
Bugs surfaced
11
Upstream PRs
120k
Execs / sec
Applied ML · Privacy2025
Private inference for alpha models
FHE‑backed inference so signals never leave the enclave. Latency budget met at production scale.
CUDAFHERustNitro Enclaves
74 ms
Latency p99
4
Model families
0 bits
Leakage (audited)
Founded2020
Engineers & scientists54
Open‑source repos82
Core protocol PRs430+
TVL shipped across clients$1.4B+
Agents running in prod60+
Values
Why the work feels the way it does.
Taste, ownership, and calm. In that order. These shape our hiring, our scoping, and our Saturday mornings.
01
Taste over trend
We resist fashion for its own sake. If a tool adds complexity, it needs to pay rent in clarity, safety or speed.
02
Own the whole stack
From chain to chat, our people read the full code path. No hand‑offs to a black box. No magic.
03
Ship, then talk
We prefer a commit over a conference deck. Our public proof lives on GitHub, on‑chain, and in post‑mortems.
04
Automate the boring
If a human is doing the same thing twice, we automate it and give the time back. That is the whole thesis.
05
Long horizons
Crypto cycles and AI hype cycles both favor the impatient. We plan in years and review in weeks.
06
Calm under fire
Markets break, models drift, incidents happen. We answer with checklists, logs and quiet execution.
Research & notes
What we publish.
Paper18 min
Post‑quantum key custody without blowing up UX
A practical migration plan for HSM‑backed signers moving to lattice‑based schemes without breaking end users.
Mira Kapoor, Rafael Costa2026‑03
Field note9 min
Replayable agents: the audit trail is the product
Why we record every tool call, memory write and policy update — and how that record becomes a product feature.
Ömer Yıldız2026‑02
Whitepaper26 min
A risk taxonomy for DeFAI
Mapping MEV, oracle drift, protocol drift, policy drift and agent drift into a unified loss framework.
Jonas Weil, Aris Novák2025‑11
Open for Q3 · 2026 engagements
Bring us the hardest problem on your roadmap.
A protocol you cannot risk getting wrong. An agent system that needs to behave. A trading stack that has to be audit‑ready by Q4. We scope in a week and ship in months, not quarters.