The work shipped.

ADA Handles

Custom wallet addresses on Cardano, secured on-chain.

Co-founded with my second-eldest son in 2021. I run platform engineering and the AI ops layer.

• 265K+address-resolution NFTs
• 70K+wallets resolved
• 10KNFT collection with updateable mint/edit
• Allmajor Cardano wallets adopted

The platform is a constellation of services across the handle.me namespace. The work in impact terms:

• Killed the centralized mint server. Anyone can mint or edit a handle on-chain within the contract’s rules. Every major Cardano wallet adopted the pattern. (decentralized-minting, handles-personalization, cip-68-444-minting, cip-68-222-minting.)
• The withdraw-0 / observer trick — contracts that upgrade in place. Worked out the Cardano technique that lets a live contract have its logic upgraded without moving the locked UTxOs to a new address. This is what makes our cutover work without state migration or chain downtime. (Currently shipping live in handles-personalization.)
• Two parallel cutovers off Helios. Smart contracts moving to Aiken for type safety and auditability — DeMi and SubHandles are on Aiken; Personalization not yet. The TX-building library moving to @cardano-sdk/*.
• OAuth-over-NFT-ownership. A wallet holding a handle can act as an OAuth identity provider — Web2 SSO ergonomics on self-custody wallets, no custodian. I pioneered Lit at Kora Labs in this codebase; the patterns echo through to my lambda-site-template (which this site is built on). (auth.handle.me.)
• Merkle Patricia Tries inside on-chain code. Ported a non-trivial cryptographic structure into a Cardano-targeting language so contracts can prove membership over large datasets without storing them on-chain. (merkle-patricia-forestry-helios.)
• Browserless dynamic SVG rendering at scale. Every handle’s NFT image is generated server-side via typographic SVG — hundreds of thousands of unique renders across reissues and personalization. (handle-svg, render.handle.me.)
• Cardano Node on AWS Fargate (ran in production; retired for cost). cardano-node, Ogmios, and the Handles API on Fargate + EFS for redundancy, failover, auto-scaling, and reproducible deployment. The fun trick: cross-host node-socket connectivity solved via socat bridging Unix domain sockets to TCP. Production-grade serverless ops on a chain that didn’t expect to be run that way. Eventually retired — Fargate at this scale wasn’t sustainable on the bill — but the technique still travels.
• IPFS content validation inside on-chain code. A Cardano smart contract can validate the contents of an IPFS file by matching the CIDv1 embedded hash against redeemer-supplied bytes — with care around chunk size and the ~1KB–12KB sweet spot. Live in production for personalization.
• Discord as the production control plane. Tickets, deploys, alerts, and ban decisions flow through Discord. Built the bot, the CloudWatch → Discord alerting pipeline, and the deploy automation operators trigger from chat threads. (See K.O.R.A. below for the autonomous-agent layer on top.)

HAL — Handle Augmented Lifeform

One of the best minting experiences on Cardano.

A second product line built on the on-chain primitives Handles introduced. SDK + minting engine + 3D-asset support, so external Cardano teams can ship NFT collections without rebuilding the contracts and orchestration we already battle-tested.

• ~4Ktransactions chained in a single run
• 70K+tokens minted
• 8 / 9scripts and ref inputs per tx
• 100%deterministic settlement

The single most validating run (June 2025): chained ~4,000 transactions minting 70K+ tokens in a single coordinated session. Every tx relied on the previous, with 8 scripts and 9 reference inputs each. We were minting faster than the chain settled. Every transaction landed deterministically.

For Cardano peers: this is what production-grade minting looks like when the contract chain, the engine, and the SDK are all yours. The minting infrastructure unified back to power Handles minting too — minting.handle.me serves both. (Repo cluster: hal.handle.me, hal-minting-engine, hal-minting-contracts, hal-sdk, hal-glb, minting.handle.me.)