Based in Vienna. Open to selected CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, and technical co-founder conversations. Strongest fit: stablecoins, wallets, account abstraction, privacy, DeFi infrastructure, and fintech where smart contracts are the product. Remote-Europe and hybrid both work.
At a glance
- CTO at Morpher Labs since 2020. ~681k accounts, 2,000+ synthetic markets.
- Co-founder and CTO at Permissionless Inc, building stablecoin and privacy infrastructure.
- Architected ~681k web wallets with a chain-agnostic, RPC-intercepting signer.
- Over 140,000 Ethereum developers learned through my course platform.
- MSc in Telematics from Graz University of Technology. ML and Signal Processing focus.
About
I'm a CTO who leads from the codebase. I set technical direction, design architecture, build engineering culture, and still write code when the hardest production problems show up.
My strongest fit is with Web3, fintech, and infrastructure teams that need someone who can connect protocol design, backend systems, DevOps, product constraints, and pragmatic team leadership. I have shipped real on-chain products at scale: wallets used by hundreds of thousands, custom L2 infrastructure, high-frequency data pipelines, and the smart contracts behind them. I have also built and run the engineering teams that operate them.
Where I'm strongest
I'm strongest where blockchain is core to the product, not a marketing layer.
- Stablecoins and DeFi infrastructure
- Wallets and account abstraction (ERC-4337, EIP-7702)
- Privacy and compliance systems (zk, KYC-aware, post-quantum)
- Tokenization, RWA, and on-chain settlement platforms
- Fintech where smart contracts are the product, not the marketing layer
- Early-to-mid engineering teams that need architecture and execution from one person
Work Experience
Co-founder and CTO. Building a permissionless stablecoin protocol that combines on-chain overcollateralization, yield-generating collateral strategies, and privacy-preserving compliance infrastructure.
- Currently sole developer on the technical side: protocol, pool, compliance layer, and developer docs. Also driving strategy and marketing across upd.io, permissionless-technologies.com, and the preview.upd.io showcase app that ties every component together. Architecture is designed to scale to a real engineering team without rewriting.
- Designing the full protocol stack: stablecoin issuance, collateral management, and a compliance-aware dual SNARK-and-STARK privacy layer.
- Building the first native post-quantum STARK verifier on Ethereum L1, with BLS12-381 SNARKs on the hot path for real 128-bit security and STARKs as the post-quantum vault layer (verified through SP1 wrapping today, upgradeable to native STARK precompiles).
- Currently pre-launch on Sepolia. Pre-audit.
- Stack: Solidity, Foundry, OpenZeppelin, SP1, Circom, TypeScript, Next.js.
Lead engineering for a blockchain-based trading platform. ~681k accounts, 50–100k monthly actives, 2,000+ synthetic markets spanning equities, commodities, crypto, forex, indices, and a set of unique custom markets.
- Scaled engineering from 3 unstructured devs to 7 across 2 product teams (desktop and mobile). Senior ICs were promoted into team-lead roles, not replaced by outside hires.
- Architected the Morpher Wallet. It is an encrypted, double-salted keystore that acts as an RPC-intercepting signer. The wallet itself only signs; the RPC sits outside the wallet, so it is chain-agnostic by design. ~681k wallets created. Works with any EVM chain.
- Designed and operated a custom Plasma L2 with in-house validators and 1-second block times, well before today's L2 ecosystem (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base) reached production maturity.
- Built a high-frequency tick-data pipeline that aggregates 8 sources at 1–2k msg/s average and 10k peak. 100% retention via S3 and Athena, with <500ms latency end to end.
- Migrated production smart contracts to upgradeable proxies. Coordinated multi-chain settlement across the in-house plasma chain, Polygon, and Base, with several hundred thousand on-chain transactions processed.
- Led incident response twice. An AWS datacenter fire forced a redesign of redundancy and failover automation. A supply-chain attack against a dependency tightened release verification and signature procedures. Both became lasting improvements.
- Stack: Node.js, AWS, Docker, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, Solidity, Foundry, Truffle, OpenZeppelin, Vue, Jira, Notion.
Bitcoders GmbH
Led technical strategy and delivery for a portfolio of blockchain and fintech client projects.
- Built and ran a senior engineering team across multiple concurrent client engagements.
- Ran the same hiring loop I later refined at Morpher. Zero voluntary attrition on engineering hires.
- Owned architecture, delivery, and client-facing technical decisions end to end.
Moschitz IT
Built an accounting SaaS and a warehouse tracking solution from prototype to production, plus the bespoke cloud hosting infrastructure that ran them.
- Stack: PHP, MySQL, Galera Cluster, Linux, Java, Android
Case studies
All case studies →Deeper write-ups on the systems above. Problem, constraints, architecture, what I owned, outcome, and tradeoffs.
Leadership operating system
How I run engineering teams. What I have actually built, not what I believe in.
Scaled engineering from 3 unstructured devs to 7, split across 2 product teams (desktop and mobile). Senior ICs were promoted into team-lead roles, not replaced by external manager hires.
9 senior engineering hires across Bitcoders and Morpher. Zero voluntary attrition on those hires.
Built a hiring loop with role-specific coding exercises, structured feedback, and team calibration. I would port the same process directly into a new company.
Introduced the full Scrum cadence (planning, refinement, review, retro). On top of that, an executive-friendly forecasting layer so feature delivery, releases, and GTM stay aligned with the rest of the company.
Led incident response twice when it counted. An AWS datacenter fire pushed us to redesign redundancy and automate failover. A supply-chain attack against a dependency tightened our release verification and signature checks.
Owned performance reviews, including the hard ones.
Cross-functional ownership across product, design, marketing, compliance, and customer support. In an early-stage company, that is the default mode.
Anti-pattern I reject: process theater. A natural paper trail is fine. Bureaucracy that costs throughput is not. Wins belong to the team; failures stop with the senior person.
Education
Telematics is about modeling, planning, implementing, operating and assessing complex hard- and software systems. Similar to Computer Science, but also covers the underlying electrotechnical layer. Specialization in Machine Learning and Signal Processing. Master's Thesis Project completed at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth, focusing on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.
Skills
Blockchain & Protocols
Backend & Infrastructure
AI & Data
Leadership & Delivery
Tools, courses, and infrastructure I've built
A few public-facing projects beyond the company work above.
Ethereum Blockchain Developer Course
One of the largest Ethereum developer education platforms. Over 140,000 students learned Solidity, smart contract security, Foundry, Hardhat, and production Web3 workflows here. Public authority, mentorship at scale, and a long-term commitment to the space.
Autoreel: Agent-Driven Video Pipeline
A 10-stage Claude Agent SDK pipeline that produces developer-tutorial videos end to end. Word-anchored Whisper timing as the canonical clock, Remotion for compositional rendering, Playwright + CDP for screen capture, an injected EIP-1193 wallet mock with EIP-6963 announce for Web3 demos, and Claude-driven visual gates that catch broken layouts before render. Outputs 1080p long-form and 9:16 shorts from one storyboard. Built to scale Solidity tutorial production to the next cohort of learners.
Let's talk
For CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or technical co-founder conversations, email me at me [at] thomaswiesner.com or reach out on LinkedIn or Farcaster.
I'm especially interested in serious teams building blockchain infrastructure, wallets, stablecoins, privacy, DeFi, or fintech products. I read every legitimate inbound; unsolicited recruiter spam will be ignored.