I'm Nikhil Ranjan — a software architect in Berlin building scalable, decentralized systems. CTO & Co-founder of Polkassembly, ex-Parity, ex-DFINITY. I write a lot of Rust, ship in the open, and care deeply about systems engineering, sandboxed runtimes, and on-chain governance.
A focused set of systems-heavy projects spanning browsers, databases and on-chain governance — all open source, all written primarily in Rust.
A binary-native browser written in Rust that fetches and executes WebAssembly modules directly — no HTML, no JavaScript. Capability-based sandbox built on Wasmtime, Tokio and egui, with strict zero-IO defaults.
A production-grade embedded database engine in Rust, inspired by SQLite but built for modern hardware. MVCC, async I/O on io_uring, lock-free data structures, SIMD vectorization and NVMe-aware storage.
The flagship governance platform for Polkadot & Kusama. On-chain proposal browsing, discussion, delegation and direct voting. Tracked 1,700+ referenda, $300M+ in treasury decisions and 250K+ participants across 50+ networks.
An AI governance agent for Polkadot OpenGov. GPT-4-driven proposal analysis, automated voting with 6× conviction, and delegation flows — applying agentic AI to on-chain decision making at protocol scale.
Deep dives into systems engineering, browser architecture, AI-native programming, and database design — published as long-form articles on X.
A personal account of building VelociDB — a modern embedded database engine in Rust — and what the hard edges of storage engines, concurrency, and systems design teach you about engineering judgment.
Read on XA comprehensive walkthrough of Oxide's architecture and SDK: immediate-mode rendering, capability-based sandboxing, GPU compute, WebRTC, media playback, and patterns for building real applications without HTML, CSS, or a DOM.
Read on XA manifesto on why HTML is the wrong abstraction for the modern internet, and how Oxide — a binary-first browser that runs WebAssembly instead of HTML — rethinks application delivery from the ground up with capability-based security.
Read on XAn analysis of whether fully autonomous AI systems can execute the entire scientific lifecycle — from hypothesis generation and experimentation to manuscript authoring and peer review — supported by knowledge graphs and semantic novelty detection.
Read on XArguing that human-readable languages are the CISC of the AI era, this paper proposes Neural-RISC: a machine-native programming language designed for LLM compilation, with token-vocabulary alignment, graph-native execution, and logit-masking for type safety.
Read on XA comprehensive architectural blueprint for a modern embedded database engine in Rust, covering MVCC concurrency, io_uring async I/O, PMEM integration, SIMD vectorized execution, and CRDT-based distributed synchronization.
Read on XDeep technical guides for writing secure, production-ready smart contracts — from ink! on Polkadot to Motoko on the Internet Computer.
An authoritative manual for Motoko and ICP's unified World Computer model — covering identity, tokenomics, ledger integration, asynchronous messaging safety, orthogonal persistence, and a full OpenPatron dapp build.
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A comprehensive guide to ink!, the Rust-based eDSL for smart contracts on polkadot-sdk chains — from fundamentals and ERC-20 patterns through testing, debugging, and production deployment across the Polkadot ecosystem.
View on AmazonPapers on cryptoeconomic protocols, decentralized systems, and software supply chain security.
From core protocol contributions at Parity to founding the ecosystem's flagship governance platform — I've helped shape how millions of DOT and KSM holders coordinate, fund, and govern.
A snapshot of contributions across the stack — from runtime code to ecosystem-defining infrastructure.
A decade across founding teams, unicorn-scale platforms, and core blockchain infrastructure.
Founded and architected Polkadot's flagship governance platform. Built Substrate-integrated Rust backends for proposal analysis, validator coordination and delegated voting. Shipped inscription tokens on Polkadot & Avail, EVM deployments on Kusama, and AI agents for OpenGov. Grew the open-source org from 1 to 20 engineers.
Supported Rust and Motoko developers building on ICP — DeFi primitives, ledger mechanics, secure canister deployments. Ran the Developer Partner & Grants program and authored governance proposals (including reducing minimum dissolve delays) that directly impacted a $6B+ ecosystem.
Core contributions to the launch of Polkadot & Kusama. Implemented validator lifecycle and subnet coordination logic in Rust/Substrate, built wallet integrations across Polkadot.js, and collaborated with parachain teams like Astar on their runtime.
Built the used-car marketplace serving emerging markets across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Stack: Node.js, React, MySQL, Elasticsearch.
Built m.tokopedia.com (Tokopedia Lite) — winner of Google's Best PWA award. Founding engineer for the India team; helped set up hiring and dev infrastructure. Stack: Go, Node.js, React.
Founding engineer on India's leading P2P payment system & superapp. Built Node.js microservices that scaled to 100M+ users with caching, load balancing and minimal downtime.
Deep specialization in Rust and systems programming, with full-stack range from low-level storage engines to product UI.
Open to collaborating on Rust, systems, and Polkadot ecosystem projects. The fastest way to reach me is email or X.