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 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 XPapers 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.