A small company, built for long horizons.
BlockZenith was founded in 2020 by a group of class‑2017 blockchain builders and AI/ML scientists. Between us we have contributed to Bitcoin Core, the Ethereum client ecosystem, and early Polkadot parachains. We have shipped production DeFi, run market‑making desks, and published at NeurIPS, ICML and ACL.
We built BlockZenith to keep doing that work in one place, with the people we trust most. Our goal is boring: ship frontier systems that behave in production, and give clients their weekends back.
Automate the complexity your teams hate, so they can do work that matters.
Every engagement starts with a frank conversation about where your team spends its day. We are not interested in replacing people. We are interested in retiring toil: the weekly reconciliation, the 3 AM incident call, the spreadsheet that must not break.
When we succeed, your team gets smaller responsibilities and larger agency. You hire for taste, we build the surface underneath.
- ScopeWeek‑zero sprint. Fixed price. Written memo.
- Team3–6 people, senior by default, no resource pools.
- CadenceWeekly demo + diff + decision log. No status theater.
- OwnershipYou own the code and the artifacts from day one.
- ExitRunbook + on‑call rotation handoff or retainer.
From testnet to tier‑1.
A year is long enough to ship something real. A decade is long enough to ship many.
- 2017Class of the cycle
Our founders meet contributing to Bitcoin, Ethereum and early Polkadot testnets. First shared repo pushed.
- 2020BlockZenith, formally
The company is incorporated to turn a decade of protocol work into an R&D + product house.
- 2021Lab 03 · Chain
First pallet published; two core PRs upstream into Bitcoin and Substrate.
- 2022Lab 05 · Infra
Attested builds, HSM‑backed signers and observability become our default.
- 2023Lab 04 · Applied ML
We start fine‑tuning foundation models on regulated workloads; private inference ships.
- 2024Lab 02 · Swarms
Multi‑agent reference architectures go into production at two design partners.
- 2025Lab 01 · DeFAI
Autonomous on‑chain finance: policy‑driven strategies, guardian circuits, replayable logs.
- 2026Zenith OS
Our internal operating layer opens up to select design partners. Quietly.
Six principles, one temperament.
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.
Own the whole stack
From chain to chat, our people read the full code path. No hand‑offs to a black box. No magic.
Ship, then talk
We prefer a commit over a conference deck. Our public proof lives on GitHub, on‑chain, and in post‑mortems.
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.
Long horizons
Crypto cycles and AI hype cycles both favor the impatient. We plan in years and review in weeks.
Calm under fire
Markets break, models drift, incidents happen. We answer with checklists, logs and quiet execution.
We are boring, on purpose.
Our security program is a detail‑oriented, paranoid response to shipping things that hold money.
For journalists & analysts.
- The Block2025
- Bloomberg Crypto2025
- a16z — State of Crypto2024
- The Defiant2024
Things we get asked.
Who do you typically work with?+
Funds, exchanges, foundations, neobanks, and early‑stage teams that need deep protocol or AI work to ship on a tight horizon.
Do you take equity / tokens as comp?+
Sometimes. We prefer relationships where incentives align past launch day. We are selective.
Do you open‑source what you build?+
The parts that help the market move forward, yes. The parts that are client IP, no.
Are you remote?+
We are remote‑first with hubs in Berlin, Lisbon, and Singapore. We fly people together often.
How do engagements start?+
A scoping conversation, a short written memo, and a fixed‑price week‑zero sprint. If it fits, we continue.
Do you do audits?+
We partner with audit firms; we prefer to do the work first and be audited, not the other way around.
Anything missing? We like specific questions.
Ask us directly