Skip to content
View alexwykoff's full-sized avatar

Block or report alexwykoff

Block user

Prevent this user from interacting with your repositories and sending you notifications. Learn more about blocking users.

You must be logged in to block users.

Content in all repositories owned by your account will be closed.
Maximum 250 characters. Please don’t include any personal information such as legal names or email addresses. Markdown is supported. This note will only be visible to you.
Report abuse

Contact GitHub support about this user’s behavior. Learn more about reporting abuse.

Report abuse
alexwykoff/README.md

Alex Wykoff

Product Executive · Technical Builder · Crypto Native

I build things that shouldn't exist yet.

I'm a product leader with an engineering and design background, working at the intersection of crypto, distributed systems, AI, and human-centered product design.

I've been building in crypto and decentralized technology since 2016 — from Brave's privacy-preserving advertising and cryptocurrency systems, to proof-of-stake infrastructure, to today's emerging generation of AI-native and self-sovereign software.

I'm equally comfortable in a product strategy meeting, a Figma file, or a terminal.

What I do

  • Product leadership — strategy, vision, 0→1 products, roadmaps, organizational design, and execution
  • Technical product — distributed systems, protocols, infrastructure, APIs, developer platforms, and AI systems
  • Design — UX research, interaction design, information architecture, prototyping, and design systems
  • Crypto — Ethereum, proof-of-stake, staking, wallets, DeFi, AT Protocol, IPFS, Hypercore, WebTorrent, I2P, and decentralized identity
  • AI — autonomous agents, AI software factories, verification, local models, RAG, knowledge systems, and human-in-the-loop development

I tend to go deep on technologies before the playbook exists.


Current Work

🛡️ IronCarapace

Verification-driven development for AI-generated software.

I'm building an autonomous development pipeline designed around a simple problem:

Generating code is getting cheap. Trusting generated code isn't.

IronCarapace treats AI coding as an adversarial engineering problem rather than a prompting problem.

Spec → human approval → TDD → verification gates → adversarial testing → merge

The system uses state-machine orchestration, mutation testing, empirical complexity analysis, sandboxed execution, and adversarial attacks against specifications themselves.

The goal isn't to make agents write more code.

It's to make autonomous software development trustworthy.


🌐 p2p-studio

A Rust-native platform for software that doesn't depend on the conventional web stack.

I'm exploring what happens when decentralized protocols become infrastructure rather than browser extensions or SaaS integrations.

The stack brings together:

  • Rust + Servo
  • I2P
  • AT Protocol / embedded PDS
  • IPFS
  • Hypercore / Hyperdrive
  • WebTorrent

The underlying idea is simple:

With AI evaporating technical barriers, how far can user self-sovereignty go?


🔬 Polyglot Porting System

A language-agnostic system for translating software between ecosystems while preserving behavior, tests, and idioms, rather than simply translating syntax.

Currently exploring Rust, Python, Go, TypeScript, and C++.


Crypto & Decentralized Protocols

I've spent the better part of a decade working on crypto products and infrastructure.

My experience spans both the user-facing and protocol/infrastructure sides of the industry:

Brave → staking infrastructure → Web3 product organizations → decentralized protocols → self-sovereign infrastructure

At stakefish, I led product for a company managing $1.6B+ in staked assets across 24+ proof-of-stake networks, including shipping one of the early products making Ethereum staking accessible below 32 ETH.

I've worked directly with:

  • Ethereum & EVM networks
  • Proof-of-stake infrastructure
  • Validator economics
  • Staking
  • DeFi
  • Wallets
  • Chain abstraction
  • Intent-based systems
  • AT Protocol
  • IPFS
  • Hypercore
  • WebTorrent
  • I2P
  • decentralized identity
  • privacy-preserving systems

I don't treat crypto as a vertical.

I treat decentralized protocols as a new set of primitives for building software.


AI + Product

The current wave of AI is interesting to me for the same reason crypto was interesting in 2016:

the primitives are changing faster than the product patterns.

I'm particularly interested in:

  • autonomous coding agents
  • multi-agent systems
  • verification-driven development
  • local and self-hosted AI
  • RAG and knowledge systems
  • knowledge graphs
  • AI software factories
  • agent memory
  • protocol-native agents
  • human/agent collaboration
  • AI-assisted design
  • evaluation and adversarial testing

My bias is toward building rather than speculating.

If a technology is interesting, I generally want to put it into a working system and discover where it breaks.


Product Philosophy

I believe strong product leadership requires being able to move between levels of abstraction.

Users → workflows → interfaces → systems → economics → infrastructure

A product leader doesn't need to write every line of code.

But they should be able to understand the architecture well enough to ask:

  • Why does this need to exist?
  • What is the actual user problem?
  • What is the simplest system that could solve it?
  • What assumptions are we making?
  • Where does this architecture break?
  • What happens at 10× the scale?
  • What happens when the adversary is competent?
  • What should we not build?
  • And, most importantly: so what?

That last question is usually where the product actually starts.


Previously

🦁 Brave Software

Joined Brave as employee #21 and moved from User Research into Product.

I built the research practice from scratch and drove product insights behind Brave Ads and Rewards.

Highlights:

  • Helped drive the peer-to-peer referral program through 10M+ MAUs
  • Delivered a rate-card program that saved $2M+ in a single quarter
  • Helped launch Brave Ads across 180+ countries
  • Built the web compatibility reporter
  • Created and grew community.brave.com from zero to 500k+ monthly views

It was an unusually good education in building products where privacy, cryptography, incentives, and user experience all have to work simultaneously.


🐟 stakefish

Head of Product · 2021–2022

Led product for a global proof-of-stake infrastructure company managing $1.6B+ in staked assets across 24+ networks.

Built the first formal product roadmaps and financial estimates, established product/design practices, led a distributed team, and shipped staking products designed to broaden participation in Ethereum.

Presented on Ethereum staking and validator/client diversity at ETHDenver.


🧩 WRST Collabs

Director of Product · 2022–2023

Led a product subdivision within a ~100-person Web3 organization.

Owned product and technical direction, hiring, team development, client engagements, and executive product strategy.


Technologies

PRODUCT
Product Strategy · 0→1 · Platform Strategy · Research · UX · Design
Roadmaps · Analytics · Organizational Design · GTM · Executive Leadership

CRYPTO
Ethereum · EVM · Proof of Stake · Staking · DeFi · Wallets

DECENTRALIZED PROTOCOLS
AT Protocol · IPFS · Hypercore · WebTorrent · I2P · DIDs

AI
LLMs · Agents · RAG · Knowledge Graphs · Local AI
AI Coding · Evaluation · Verification · Multi-Agent Systems

ENGINEERING
Rust · Python · TypeScript · JavaScript · Go · C++
Elixir · React · PostgreSQL · Docker · Kubernetes

SYSTEMS
Distributed Systems · P2P · Protocols · Cryptography
Privacy · Self-Sovereign Infrastructure · Developer Platforms

DESIGN
UX Research · Interaction Design · Information Architecture
Prototyping · Design Systems · Data Visualization · Figma

Things I'm Watching

I'm particularly interested in the convergence of:

AI × Crypto × P2P × Personal Computing

What happens when software can:

  • reason autonomously,
  • execute locally,
  • own its own data,
  • communicate peer-to-peer,
  • operate across decentralized protocols,
  • and verify its own work?

I don't think we have the answer yet, and that's a frontier to explore.


Let's Build

I'm interested in Head of Product, CPO/CPTO, and founding product roles where the technology is ambitious, the problem is difficult, and the team actually wants to build something new.

I'm also always happy to talk about:

crypto · distributed systems · AI agents · product · design · P2P protocols · autonomous software

alexwykoff.com

LinkedIn

X / Twitter

Pinned Loading

  1. Bimo-Studio/atdance Bimo-Studio/atdance Public

    p2p ... in my dance?

    TypeScript 1

  2. Bimo-Studio/babel Bimo-Studio/babel Public

    words go together. no, not that way... the other way