Abdelkader Kiari
Senior Protocol Engineer
I design and build the hard parts of onchain systems: matching engines, incentive design, and contracts that hold real money. Sole owner of the smart contract layer at a $110M+ protocol backed by Coinbase Ventures, empty repo to audited mainnet, no recorded exploit since.
- Onchain matching engines
- Protocol economics & incentives
- Security first engineering
- Gas & performance optimization
Open to senior and staff protocol roles where the contract layer is the hard part: architecture, implementation, and the security posture, owned end to end. Remote or relocation.
$110M+
protocol funded, Coinbase Ventures backed
15
mainnet contracts, source verified onchain
80%
less gas per trade, 142K to 28K
14M+
settlements stress tested on testnet
Work
I owned the contract layer: settlement engine and its economics, blank repo to mainnet
I owned Portal to Bitcoin's EVM contract layer and architected the whole onchain system: the atomic settlement engine and the staking, slashing, incentive, liquidity, fee, and accounting machinery around it, from a blank repo to mainnet, no recorded exploit since.
15
contracts across two chains
16
deployments with verified source onchain
Onchain matching engine: the AMM to orderbook call
Led the call to replace the protocol's AMM with an onchain orderbook, then built the matching engine underneath it: a red black tree over price levels, a linked list per level, and a hash index that reaches any order directly, so cost per operation stops scaling with book depth. An 80% cut in gas per trade, 142K to 28K, and a book that stays fast as it fills.
80%
less gas per trade, 142K to 28K
O(log n)
cost per order, not linear in book depth
Trustless institutional OTC: block trades that settle across Bitcoin and EVM with no desk holding the funds
I built the settlement rails the institutional OTC desk runs on, and I conducted its full security audit. Two large counterparties agree a block trade off the public book, and it settles trustlessly across Bitcoin and EVM in a single atomic move, no custodian, no bridge, no wrapped assets. Real institutional deals settled on mainnet, on a settlement path I hardened to institutional reliability under load.
$5M+
USD in institutional OTC settled onchain
400x
fewer failed settlements under load, 12% to 0.03%
Testimonials
A genuine star performer. I was relieved when he stayed.
The best testing discipline I have seen, and he ships reliably every time.
Abdel is a rockstar.
Writing
Curve or Book: The Ordering Rule Decides, Not the Asset Class
Both primitives priced in one unit on the term where they differ, where volatility cancels wherever a maker chooses his own spread and the venue's ordering rule decides whether he can.
Count Every Division Before the Balance Write
A fee is derived, so the design question is where its remainders are allocated. Six call sites on one engine's fill path, three rounding directions, and an enumerated bound on what fragmentation costs.
Count the Price Sources That Can Write Your Balance Down
Where a shortfall lands differs between the two designs, and what decides your exposure is how many price sources can reach the total you redeem against, and who sets that number after you deposit.
What a Runtime Can Name Before It Runs
Where a chain keeps its state decides what it can price and cap per named object, and handing an engine perfect write sets did not decide throughput on the one benchmark that tried it.
Experience
Jan 2024 to Jun 2026
Portal to Bitcoin · Senior Solidity & EVM Engineer
Owned the entire EVM contract layer of a noncustodial crosschain settlement protocol, trustless BTC to EVM, from blank repo to mainnet. 15 contracts live since November 2025, no recorded exploit.
Feb 2022 to Jan 2024
Blockcerts · Senior Solidity Engineer
Solidity engineer with a scope that grew from contract development to owning the company's blockchain architecture and direction.
Jun 2022 to May 2023
Orivium · CTO (part time)
Technical lead for a blockchain gaming project, owning the architecture and the team.
Oct 2021 to Feb 2022
Tok'Art · Cofounder & CTO
Cofounded an NFT marketplace and owned the technical build.
Education
EPITECH · Information Technology engineering program · 3W Academy · Fullstack Web Development
About
I'm the engineer you hand the part that cannot fail. At Portal to Bitcoin I was sole owner of the smart contract layer of a $110M+ protocol backed by Coinbase Ventures, and I architected all of it: the settlement engine, the staking and slashing economics, the incentive design that keeps validators and users honest, the accounting and registries under all of it, empty repo to audited mainnet with no recorded exploit since. I owned the whole codebase, so I know every piece of it to the floor.
The calls were mine and so was the cost of them. I reversed the protocol's core matching model from an AMM to an onchain orderbook, argued it on four grounds, then took the matching engine from 142K to 28K gas per trade, an 80% cut, so the decision stayed affordable to keep. I made external adversarial review the release gate rather than a formality, and held the code under fuzzing and invariants until it shipped clean. These are economic systems written in code, and the hard part lives in both at once: the mechanism and the bytecode.
I also conduct security audits, including a full audit of an institutional OTC desk running in production, covering the EVM contract surface and its TypeScript integration. Reading someone else's contracts for what breaks them and writing my own to survive it are the same discipline pointed in two directions.
What I want next is the hardest onchain component in a system, owned end to end, with a team that holds the same bar. Every mainnet address and the audit reports are on the proof page, and my email is at the bottom of this one.
