First real exposure to production DeFi. Built automation bots for strategy rebalancing and smart contract operations — learned fast what happens when onchain automation breaks in a live system. Also built the ops dashboard for monitoring contract state, tracking transactions, and managing protocol deployments. Got a practical education in how yield strategies actually execute across chains, and how to instrument systems so you know when something is wrong before users do.

Started as an intern, ended up doing backend infrastructure and developer relations across two and a half years. On the infra side: built TRON gasless transaction infrastructure using JIT energy rental that cut costs by 60%, and designed the status API that handled 3M+ transactions a month across 50+ chains. On the devrel side: answered thousands of developer questions from 30+ protocols — MoonPay, Kraken, Infinex, MakerDAO, Beefy, and others — and wrote docs from scratch when official ones didn't exist. Also helped enterprise clients like Kraken, Lisk, and Reya figure out their chain architecture: DA layer choices, sequencing, settlement tradeoffs. That work taught me something most backend roles don't: what it means to build for developers, not just users. You understand failure modes differently when you're also the one explaining them.

Also built an elizaOS AI agent during that time — presented it live at ETH Dubai 2025. open source · watch the demo.