Co-founded with my second-eldest son in 2021. I started at Kora Labs that year and have been its CIO and co-owner since 2022, running platform engineering and the AI ops layer. The platform is a constellation of services across the [github.com/koralabs](https://github.com/koralabs) namespace. That includes an open-source, chain-scanned API backed by in-memory and Valkey stores. The scale figures above are published portfolio snapshots, not live counters. The work in impact terms: - **Converted to completely decentralized minting.** Anyone can mint or edit a handle on-chain within the contract's rules. Every major Cardano wallet adopted the new policy. - **Contracts that upgrade in place.** The "withdraw 0" / observer trick. Cardano lets you replace a contract's logic without moving the locked UTxOs anywhere new, if you set it up right. We worked out the technique against live state. It's the reason our cutover doesn't need a state migration or chain downtime. - **NFT-based OAuth where the identity is your handle.** Hold the NFT, sign in to anything that speaks OAuth. Web2 SSO ergonomics on a self-custody wallet, no custodian holding your keys. - **Merkle Patricia Tries inside on-chain code.** Ported the structure into Aiken so contracts can prove membership in a dataset that's far too big to store on chain. - **Browserless dynamic SVG rendering at scale.** Every handle's NFT image is typographic SVG generated server-side. Hundreds of thousands of unique renders across reissues and personalization. - **Serverless Cardano Node on AWS Fargate.** We ran the node, Ogmios, and the Handles API on Fargate plus EFS, picking up redundancy, failover, auto-scaling, and reproducible deployment. The trick that made it work: cross-host node-socket connectivity, solved with `socat` bridging a Unix domain socket to TCP. This ran in production and was later retired for cost; it is not our current hosting setup. [The original engineering thread](https://x.com/PapaGooseCrypto/status/1594454314398846976) records the approach. - **On-chain IPFS content validation.** A Cardano smart contract validates the contents of an IPFS file by matching the CIDv1 embedded hash against bytes supplied in the redeemer. Around the 1KB to 12KB sweet spot for content size. Used live for personalization. - **Discord as a production control plane.** Tickets land there. Deploys go through there. Alerts wake people up there. I built the bot, the CloudWatch alerting pipeline, and the deploy automation that operators trigger from chat threads. The autonomous-agent layer on top of all this is K.O.R.A. - **Two parallel cutovers - contract language and transaction tooling** Smart contracts moving to Aiken: DeMi and SubHandles are there, Personalization next. The TX-building library moved to `@cardano-sdk/*`. - **A 99% cut in monthly hosting cost.** I led the cost and performance analysis and the migrations, from about $8K a month to about $80: DB-Sync (about $8K), then Ogmios on ECS (about $5K), then Lambda with Valkey/Redis and provider APIs from Koios, Blockfrost and Maestro (about $1.4K), then Cloudflare and self-hosted servers (about $80). The Fargate node setup above was part of the ECS stage. - **Chain lookups 38× faster.** Moving sparse transaction discovery to Maestro took a 200-block probe from 25.75s to 0.67s, with Koios and Blockfrost as fallbacks. - **I wrote the smart-contract audits.** I was the sole author of the audits for Handles DeMi (April 2025, [published audit](https://public.koralabs.io/documentation/HandlesDeMiAudit.pdf)) and for our CIP-68 444 minting and editing contracts (October 2024). Because we were auditing our own contracts, Eric Lee reviewed and approved both as an impartial third party. - **HandleComms design.** In April 2025 I designed decentralized, end-to-end-encrypted messaging for Cardano dApps and HandleChat, built in Rust on libp2p peer-to-peer networking, the Signal Protocol and blockchain identity. - **[marketplace.handle.me](https://marketplace.handle.me)** handles secondary trading on-chain. - **[chat.handle.me](https://chat.handle.me)** runs direct messaging keyed to handle identity. - **[secrets.handle.me](https://secrets.handle.me)** is research-stage, looking at account recovery via social trust graphs. - **[merch.handle.me](https://merch.handle.me)** and [metaverse.handle.me](https://metaverse.handle.me) are announced and in flight. A second product line, built on the on-chain primitives Handles introduced. We expose it as an SDK, a minting engine, and 3D-asset support, so other Cardano teams can ship NFT collections without rebuilding the contracts and orchestration we already worked through. - 5 ASSETS! - each H.A.L. mint comes with four additional assets (five total assets per mint)
- 100 $0 LEGENDARY Handle raffle tickets - randomly selected during the mint
- 100% 3D - each H.A.L. is a 100% 3D asset, equipped with multiple 3D assets, all identified in the datum. The 2D image is a direct Blender render of the 3D H.A.L.
- FOURTEEN 1-OF-1s - 14 available legendary 1-of-1s (24 total including KOLs and Founders)
- Virtual SubHandle Tracking!
- Each H.A.L. gets a free Virtual SubHandle in the format of $designation@hal that tracks the address of your H.A.L.
- Two years of Virtual SubHandle subscription costs are covered up-front, after which there is no obligation to continue to use it.
- Unity & Unreal Engine FBX Files and Web GLB files
- $handle ecosystem benefits (discounts, early/final access, etc)
- CIP-68 3D Personalization
- 13 project collaboration (whitelists, custom assets, and a few 1-of-1s)
- OG and 2-character Handle whitelist, and ~1000 project giveaway whitelist spots.
- Expansive lore with factions, battles, ranking, etc
- Royalties greater than 2.5% (for the original artist) go to a H.A.L. community treasury. High royalties during mint and before staking mechanism is live.
- 4,000+ chained transactions minted 70K+ tokens. Each transaction depended on the previous one (8 scripts, 9 reference inputs). We read the chain only for the first transaction, minted faster than blocks settled, and every transaction settled. [The mint thread](https://x.com/PapaGooseCrypto/status/1937250755314090285) has the details.
- A truly unique, first of it's kind, DECENTRALIZED MINTING experience. All 10K H.A.L.s are minted through smart contracts that also control uniqueness and whitelists. All to be OPEN-SOURCED after launch.
A multi-component, autonomous, self-repair agent running day-to-day ops for the Handles ecosystem interfacing via Discord. She triages tickets, moderates, monitors, responds to alerts, orchestrates deployments, and synthesizes knowledge from the ecosystem history. The pipeline is a chat gate into an AI provider into an executor into a worker. She tests herself in three layers: hermetic with mocks, real-process against test services, live-canary on real data with no side effects. Nothing ships green-by-inference. I headed K.O.R.A. She finds and fixes vulnerabilities across every repo with native audit tools and Dependabot, and runs rotating test-coverage sweeps that hold 90% line and branch gates and replace shallow, self-serving tests with real behavior tests. She uses Discord as the operator UI on purpose. Pinned messages contain the agent's current settings. Operators can use plain language to flip toggles ("turn chat responses off") or turn knobs ("increase GIF responses to 40%"). Alerts post to operator channels with enough metadata for K.O.R.A. to triage them. When someone types "deploy to mainnet" or "troubleshoot this ticket," K.O.R.A. actually does the deploy or looks into the ticket. Two AI-driven products. [clicked.bio](https://clicked.bio) is an AI-driven links and posts platform for content creators and the agencies that manage them. [Remindsly](https://remindsly.com) is an AI-driven reminder system that keeps after you until the task gets done. ### Capital One, Senior then Master Platform Engineer, 2019 to 2022 Senior Platform Engineer from April 2019 to March 2021, then Master Platform Engineer from March 2021 to May 2022. I designed an autoscaled serverless Fargate platform that streamed 25,000 synthetic Kafka records per second from our ML team's synthetic data models. Day-to-day I owned vulnerability monitoring and resolution across our team's containers, images, repositories and packages, alongside threat analysis and scoring. I [left Capital One for Cardano in May 2022](https://x.com/PapaGooseCrypto/status/1526660509969227778). ### Xero, Senior SWE and DevOps, 2013 to 2018 Five years and more than a hundred two-week sprints on a 2-million-user SaaS accounting and payroll platform. I built the contextual auto-complete search: two million indexed objects on AWS ElasticSearch, queried dozens of times per second. A Docker-containerized Node.js and Express API served the search on ECS; Lambda handled indexing. The delivery side mattered just as much: I assisted with dozens of deployments using TeamCity build chains and CloudFormation. My application work included C#, .NET Core, MVC and REST APIs—not just the infrastructure around them. ### Pixelsilk, product director and part owner, 2007 to 2012 Pixelsilk started in 2006 as a product built by a Smart Solutions team I led, and became its own company in 2007, with me as part owner. A CMS hosting more than 1,000 websites, with individual sites reaching 30,000 pages. I worked across product management and code: roadmap, releases, and communication with partners, customers and vendors. Five years connecting what the product needed to do with what the team could ship. ### Smart Solutions, Software Engineer and Project Manager, 2002 to 2012 My C#/.NET and SQL Server chapter, overlapping my Pixelsilk years. I managed work across 200 active customers, 50 active projects and seven full-time staff, with projects reaching 4,500 hours, using Project Server and Project Web Access. I planned and shipped an automated quality dashboard covering error rates, unit and functional tests, performance and load tests, network resources, releases and uptime. Delivery and operations belonged in the same picture. ### The Tropical Connection, IS Manager and part owner, 1999 to 2001 A flower wholesaler with a $250,000 custom ERP system that I redesigned around order entry, picking, packing, shipping and customer management. Visual FoxPro, Pervasive.SQL/Btrieve, Visual Basic 5/6 and Crystal Reports did the work, with integrations into FedEx PowerShip, QuickBooks and Outlook. ### Eric M. Watanabe Realty, Hawaii, Network Admin and Computer Tech, 1997 to 1999 I maintained the office network and computers and trained co-workers to use them. ### U.S. Air Force, Aerospace Ground Equipment, 1994 to 1998 Hardware and systems before software was the day job. I completed AGE Apprentice training in 1995 and AGE Journeyman training in 1998, covering avionic and flight-control maintenance systems, periodic maintenance and malfunction identification. ### Platform engineering, across those chapters The through-line is redundancy, failover, quick recovery, auto-scaling and reproducible deployment, with as little operator overhead as possible. At Xero that included search delivery and repeatable releases; at Capital One, streaming infrastructure and vulnerability monitoring; at Kora Labs, chain services, CloudWatch alerting and deployments operated through Discord. I earned AWS Certified Developer — Associate in 2017 and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional in 2020. Those are the years earned, not a claim that either certification is currently active. My degree is a Bachelor of Arts in Education from Ashford University, completed in 2012. Earlier certifications: Google AdWords Professional (2007), Microsoft MCAD for web, Windows and XML applications (2004), and Microsoft MCP for NT Workstation and Server 4.0 (1999). ### Skills, by years of hands-on experience I've been writing code for 43 years, since I was 8. Programming has been my core interest every year since, even before it was my career. That includes 14 years of DevOps and platform work and 13 years on financial applications: banking at Capital One, accounting and payroll at Xero, and on-chain payments at Kora Labs. HTML, CSS and JavaScript 25; SQL (MS SQL, Postgres, MySQL) 20; .NET (C#, VB, Core and Mono) 18; GitHub Actions, Jenkins and TeamCity 15; cloud (AWS, GCP, Cloudflare) 13; Python 8; blockchain and smart contracts 5; Lucene, Elasticsearch and Redis 5; Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence 5; project management 5; product management 5; Perl/CGI, PHP and Classic ASP 4; quality control and engineering 4; AI inference and autonomy optimization 2.