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.
Independent
Consulting, advising, and writing — smart contracts first, but the door is open. Essays at wschwab.substack.com.
ViFi
Smart contracts lead — pre-launch roadmap, production readiness, founder-facing guidance.
Alchemix
Engineering manager — v3: core, strategies, governance, and a gauntlet of audits.
Polygon Labs
Smart contract team lead / engineering manager — built and ran the team serving (almost) all of Polygon's smart contract needs.
Linum Labs
Web3 engineer, promoted to Solidity team lead — client work across the EVM stack.
Ethereum Cat Herders
Wrangler, then Catblazer — EIP process, official note-taker for All Core Devs, podcast host, multisig signer.
Materials.Zone
Junior Blockchain engineer — decentralized data marketplace, governance research, mechanism design.
Down the Rabbit Hole
ML coursework and an economics degree collide with Ethereum.
ViFi
Smart Contracts at Virtual Finance — pre-launch 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, running the dev process, and shepherding the protocol 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, note-taking for All Core Devs, 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 I've been working on the AI stack: harnesses, skills, MCP, local models via ollama and vLLM, libre frontends.
// 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.
Latest Essay
Posting thoughts at wschwab.substack.com — this card always shows the newest post.
Understanding 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 →