William Schwab

Smart contract developer
and engineering leader,
independent.

Ethereum, 2017 – present.
Protocol engineering, governance,
coordination, security.

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.

Testimony

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Technology should serve everyone it touches.

Mr. Schwab: 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.

Docket

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Career docket, newest entry first
No.	Filed	Entry
8	now →	Independent. Consulting, advising, and writing — smart contracts first, but the door is open. Essays at wschwab.substack.com.
7	2026	ViFi. Smart contracts lead — pre-launch roadmap, production readiness, founder-facing guidance.
6	2024 – 2025	Alchemix. Engineering manager — v3: core, strategies, governance, and a gauntlet of audits.
5	2022 – 2023	Polygon Labs. Smart contract team lead / engineering manager — built and ran the team serving (almost) all of Polygon's smart contract needs.
4	2020 – 2022	Linum Labs. Web3 engineer, promoted to Solidity team lead — client work across the EVM stack.
3	2019 – 2023	Ethereum Cat Herders. Wrangler, then Catblazer — EIP process, official note-taker for All Core Devs, podcast host, multisig signer.
2	2018	Materials.Zone. Junior Blockchain engineer — decentralized data marketplace, governance research, mechanism design.
1	2017	Down the Rabbit Hole. ML coursework and an economics degree collide with Ethereum.

Exhibits

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Exhibit 1: ViFi

Smart Contracts Lead · 2026

Smart Contracts at Virtual Finance — pre-launch roadmap, production readiness, and clear-eyed technical guidance for the founders.

Solidity · DeFi

Exhibit 2: Alchemix

Engineering Manager · 2024 – 2025

Engineering manager for the v3 of the Alchemix protocol — core, strategy, and governance layers, running the dev process, and shepherding the protocol through multiple audits and audit competitions.

DeFi · Leadership · Audits

Exhibit 3: Polygon Labs

Smart Contract Team Lead / Engineering Manager · 2022 – 2023

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.

Solidity · EVM · Leadership

Exhibit 4: Ethereum Cat Herders

Wrangler, then Catblazer · 2019 – 2023

Four-plus years herding a protocol nobody owns: EIP shepherding, note-taking for All Core Devs, multisig signer, and host of the Cat Herders podcast — guests like samczsun included.

Governance · Coordination

Exhibit 5: Belisarius (0xa57)

Independent Research · ongoing

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.

EVM · Reverse Engineering · MEV

Exhibit 6: Ricing Project

Personal, Systems and Orchestration · 2026 – ongoing

A personal ricing project, complete with a slideshow deck. The NixOS laptop gets smart-contract discipline: a deadman switch, exact-closure deploys, and a credential audit where a passing dry run counts as a failure.

Linux · NixOS · Systems (agentic tooling)

The full index of exhibits (Each exhibit is one markdown file; add one, push, and it is entered into the record.)

Writings

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(Also on the air: Solidity Fridays livestreams with transmissions11, and the Cat Herders podcast — the samczsun episode.)

The full archive of writings