William Schwab
I build smart contracts — and the teams that ship them. Nine years across the Ethereum ecosystem: protocol engineering, governance, coordination. These days I'm independent — consulting, advising, building — rooted in the EVM, and curious well beyond it.
Technology should serve everyone it touches.
What pulled me into blockchain in 2017 is the same thing pulling me now: the conviction that powerful technology should deliver maximal positive impact.
I've spent those years writing Solidity and shipping protocols — and building the teams that do: leading the Solidity team at Linum Labs, then Polygon's smart contracts team as engineering manager, then shepherding Alchemix through development and audits. Today I freelance, consult, and advise. Alongside all of it, four-plus years with the Ethereum Cat Herders — governance, the EIP process, coordinating official note-taking for All Core Devs. (Also: EthernautDAO alum, former Cat Herders multisig signer, and an anon StackExchange account with 2,500+ rep that I'll never link here.)
I still think decentralization is wildly under-explored and under-rated — permissionless applications, decentralized storage, social media nobody owns. And I'm circling back to an old interest: my ML coursework predates the smart contracts — 2017, before Ethereum pulled me in. I'm not claiming a research career. Yet. For now, I'll be posting my thoughts and progress on Substack.
Down the Rabbit Hole
ML coursework and an economics degree collide with Ethereum.
Materials.Zone
Junior Blockchain engineer — decentralized data marketplace, governance research, mechanism design.
Ethereum Cat Herders
Wrangler, then Catblazer — EIP process, official note-taker for All Core Devs, podcast host, multisig signer.
Linum Labs
Web3 engineer, promoted to Solidity team lead — client work across the EVM stack.
Polygon Labs
Smart contract team lead / engineering manager — built and ran the team serving (almost) all of Polygon's smart contract needs.
Alchemix
Engineering manager — v3: core, strategies, governance, and a gauntlet of audits.
ViFi
Smart contracts lead — pre-launch roadmap, production readiness, founder-facing guidance.
Independent
Consulting, advising, and writing — smart contracts first, but the door is open. Essays at wschwab.substack.com.
ViFi
Leading smart contracts at Virtual Finance — pre-launch audit and roadmap, production readiness, and clear-eyed technical guidance for the founders.
Alchemix
Engineering manager for the v3 of the Alchemix protocol — core, strategy, and governance layers, recruiting the team, and shepherding it through multiple audits and audit competitions.
Polygon Labs
Built and led the smart contracts team serving all of Polygon — full contract suites for new products, maintenance and upgrades across the stack, triage when things caught fire.
Ethereum Cat Herders
Four-plus years herding a protocol nobody owns: EIP shepherding, official note-taking for All Core Devs (and more), multisig signer, and host of the Cat Herders podcast — guests like samczsun included.
Belisarius (0xa57)
Reverse-engineering a prolific MEV bot from raw bytecode — manual decompilation of an unverified contract, a public dataset in progress, and ongoing strategy reconstruction. Documented as it happens.
Tools & Nodes
I run things to understand them: Ethereum nodes and an indexer, IPFS and Swarm, Radicle. Lately that means the AI stack — harnesses, skills, MCP, local models via ollama and vLLM, libre frontends. If it ships, I'll spin it up.
// each card opens a full case-study page — projects are markdown files: add one, push, it appears. all work →
Essays, occasionally.
On decentralization, ethics, and building things that deserve to exist — on Substack and Mirror.
Slop Driven Development
Some Ruminations aimed at team leads and eng management
Jul 2026Understanding Events
Everything you ever wanted to know about events and logs on Ethereum — a deep dive from the Linum Labs days.
The 0xa57 Series
Reverse-engineering a prolific MEV bot from raw bytecode — manually decompiling an unverified contract it executed from.
// also on air: Solidity Fridays livestreams with transmissions11 · the Cat Herders podcast — the samczsun episode · full archive →