Shishir Pai

Building blockchain-based commodity traceability and real-world-asset infrastructure across Cardano and Ergo. I work on smart contracts, TypeScript libraries, off-chain executors, high-throughput transaction bots, and developer documentation. Designed and implemented Merkle-trie oracle infrastructure that anchors cryptographic roots on-chain while keeping bulk supply-chain data and proofs off-chain, turning blockchain from a storage layer into a scalable verification layer. The ZenGate platform has secured over $1M in funding.

Built HodlCoin implementations on Ergo and Alephium: smart contracts, tests, off-chain execution logic, and transaction-building infrastructure. Phoenix reached about $375k historical max TVL on DefiLlama. After a whitehat exploited a critical contract vulnerability, I rewrote the contract, added full-coverage tests, and rebuilt the off-chain executor path so the protocol could operate safely on UTXO chains.

Built an Ergo NFT launchpad and marketplace spanning smart contracts, off-chain bots/APIs, and frontend work. Lilium was one of my earliest full product loops: contract design, transaction execution, artist tooling, docs, and production launch.

Worked on blockchain publishing infrastructure that made on-chain publishing feel closer to posting on social media. Built smart-contract and system optimizations that reduced transaction costs by 10x, led architecture discussions between frontend and backend teams, and ran scalability tests for high-load usage.

Built a distributed mining network for Midnight's Scavenger Mine in about five days while still in school. The system combined a multithreaded Rust miner with a serverless TypeScript backend on Cloudflare Workers, Hyperdrive, Drizzle ORM, and PostgreSQL. Nocturne processed 331M requests in 11 days, verified 25M cryptographic solutions, scaled to 14,000+ active machines, reached 328 MH/s peak network hashrate, and the miner was downloaded 50,000+ times.

Built a Cardano dynamic staking / token yield protocol while working part-time as a full-time student. The hard part was making UTXO-based staking usable: contracts do not self-execute, so I had to build performant off-chain executors, transaction builders, and a heavily tested contract system. Palm Economy reached about $1.8M historical max TVL on DefiLlama.

Built scalable oracle and traceability infrastructure for real-world commodity data. Instead of posting every event directly on-chain, the system stores Merkle roots on-chain and keeps data/proofs off-chain, enabling constant-size on-chain commitments while preserving verifiability. Public components include a Go Merkle Oracle Node, Cardano indexing, PostgreSQL state, cloud/IPFS storage, rollback handling, REST APIs, a TypeScript SDK, and Aiken Plutus V2 contracts.

Built high-performance, fault-tolerant blockchain indexing infrastructure using Go, Rust, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Docker, and actor-model patterns. The goal was reliable transaction indexing under chain rollbacks and production-grade throughput constraints.

Built a multithreaded Rust CPU miner for a Cardano token mining pool. It included binary releases, configurable threads/difficulty, and hashing optimizations that made it roughly 20x faster than the default CPU miner path in my resume benchmark.

Python-JVM wrapper for interacting with the Ergo blockchain. ErgPy provides helpers for sends, wallet address derivation, box lookup, token sends, NFT/token creation, and custom transaction building. It became one of my earliest examples of turning painful blockchain developer workflows into a library other people could use.

Built smart contracts for a decentralized name-resolution system on Ergo, letting users send funds to human-readable names instead of long addresses. The project won an Ergo Hackathon prize and was an early sign that I liked building primitives that make crypto less hostile to normal users.

Dockerized synced Ergo node setup for spinning up an operational node faster. I like infrastructure projects like this because they remove a boring blocker: if it takes too long to get a node running, fewer people build on the chain.

Built smaller projects around agentic code review, semantic repo search, AI image editing backends, and developer tooling. The common thread is the same as my blockchain work: compress messy context into tools that make builders faster.

B.S. in Computer Science, GPA 3.83. I spent most of college building production blockchain systems, miners, smart contracts, and infrastructure in parallel with school.

Won an Ergo hackathon prize for ErgoNames, a decentralized naming system that lets users send funds to human-readable handles instead of long addresses.

Built smart contracts and full test coverage for a decentralized financial game on Alephium, finishing in the top 10.

Placed 3rd for highest P&L in a simulated HFT environment against teams from across the country.

Led an Eagle Project building a sensory room for children with special needs. Earned 50+ merit badges and logged 100+ volunteer hours.