Engineer. Investor. Writer.
About
I build the Base chain in Rust at Base. Outside of that, I'm a deep value investor — I write about fallen angels, temporarily disliked companies, and businesses the market has written off. I also angel invest; reach out on X.
You can find my writing at substack and my code at github.com/refcell.
Ramblings
All postsHow blockchain nodes find each other with no directory, the two ways peers exchange data, and how a Base node runs two separate p2p networks at once, one for execution and one for consensus.
How a rollup proves it ran correctly with a program that never touches the network, and a one-line bug in how it reads its own config that can silently poison a multi-hour proof.
How Base schedules a hardfork by writing it to a contract on Ethereum instead of baking a timestamp into every node, why the reads fail closed, and why the proof has to agree on the same schedule.
base/base runs four tiers of tests and none of them measure speed. Adding performance as a fifth tier, and the harder problem underneath: making a wall-clock benchmark on shared CI hardware trustworthy enough to comment on a pull request.
A routine version bump. A database that wouldn't open. And a linker three years out of date, hiding in a build container nobody had looked at since the day it was written.
Papers
EVMBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on EVM Smart Contract Security
An open evaluation framework that tests AI agents across detecting, patching, and exploiting vulnerabilities in EVM smart contracts. Uses real vulnerabilities from public code audits and custom tasks from unreleased contracts, with each task containerized for realistic testing environments.
Writing on Substack
refcell.substack.com
Work
LinkedInBase Chain Scaling in Rust.
Built a Crypto Evaluation Framework.
Built a Crypto Evaluation Framework.
Engineered Golang Fault Proofs, Rust Fault Proofs, Rust Clients (op-reth and kona).
Solidity contracts, backend Go infrastructure, and Rust-based Cloudflare Workers.
USC's premier hackathon. Led engineering and organized hour-to-hour operations.
Curated Work
github.com/refcell
op-rs/kona
Rust fault proof VM and derivation pipeline for the OP Stack.
ethereum-optimism/optimism
Open-source framework for building Ethereum L2 blockchains.
base/base
Chain config, contracts, and tooling for the Base L2.
huff-language/huff-rs
Rust compiler for Huff, a low-level EVM assembly language.
refcell/edge-rs
Minimal Ethereum execution client written in Rust.
a16z/helios
Fast, trust-minimized Ethereum light client in Rust.
a16z/magi
Rust implementation of the OP Stack's rollup node.
bluealloy/revm
Fast, modular Rust implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
paradigmxyz/reth
Modular, contributor-friendly Ethereum full node in Rust.
alloy-rs/op-alloy
Alloy transports, middleware, and types for the OP Stack.
rainbow-me/rainbow
The Ethereum wallet that lives in your pocket.
mds1/multicall3
Aggregate multiple constant function call results into one.
GitHub
github.com/refcellAn extensible and practical demonstration of constructing evm-based sandwich attacks built with ethers-rs and Huff language.
RustRobust, Feature-Rich Solidity Template Repository for Foundry Projects with Scripting, Testing, and Utility Bash Scripts.
SolidityEdge is a high level, strongly statically typed, multi-paradigm domain specific language for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) built in Rust.
RustAn efficient, robust, and generalized batch submission service for rollup stacks written in pure rust.
Rust