Founding Engineer (Chain, Rust)

Ligate Chain is an attestation-native blockchain. Cryptographic receipts for AI calls, agent actions, prompts, and provenance, written once and verifiable forever. Implementation is a Sovereign SDK rollup on Celestia data availability, secured by Proof of Useful Attestation (PoUA). Hyperlane handles cross-chain messaging. $LGT is the native token, attestation fees and validator economics are paid in it.

Three first-party flagships ship on top, all under one token:

1. Themisra, Proof of Prompt. Registers the canonical schema themisra.proof-of-prompt/v1. For humans using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini who want a verifiable record of what they asked the model and what it returned.
2. Mneme, the first-party browser wallet. Holds $LGT, signs every chain transaction, ships with a one-click "Attest with Mneme" button injected into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
3. Iris, an open-source MCP server plus USD-billed relayer for autonomous AI agents. Agents attest their actions, Iris sponsors the gas, we keep a SaaS margin.

The bet underneath all of it: AI is about to need a hard provenance layer (EU AI Act enforcement, agent action verification, model output integrity, IP attribution for training corpora), and that market is too far from how existing chains are designed to live as someone's sidecar. We win by being the default rail for AI receipts, not by closing the gate. Third parties register their own schemas and attestor sets on the same protocol.

Devnet target Q2 2026. Marketing site at ligate.io is live, docs at docs.ligate.io are live, PoUA v0.7 paper has 25 external reviewers going through it right now, the simulator (M1 through M5) for consensus is built, and the chain repo at github.com/ligate-io/ligate-chain is public.

About this role

I'm Stefan (ex-Request Network, ex-IOHK, ex-Seamless.Finance). I'm shipping the chain solo right now. The PoUA paper is on me, the marketing site is on me, the pre-seed conversations are on me, and so is the protocol implementation. That's not sustainable and it's not how I want to build. I'm looking for a founding engineer who owns the protocol engineering pillar with me. Not a hire who executes on a spec I hand them. You'd be the first person on the team, with founding-level equity and the autonomy that comes with it.

What you'd own:

• Implementation of the core attestation module in Sovereign SDK: schemas, attestor sets, write-once attestations, the rules around schema registration and attestor membership changes.
• Validator selection (§4.1 of the paper) and attestor-set management plus slashing logic for Proof of Useful Attestation. Paper is at v0.7 and reviewer feedback is consolidating now for v0.8. You'd shape v0.8 with me, then implement it.
• Celestia DA today, native DA migration scoped (paper drafted, relationship with Celestia Labs already open). You'd own the migration when we're ready.
• Hyperlane integration for cross-chain attestation relay, so a receipt minted on Ligate can be verified on Ethereum, Solana, or any chain Hyperlane reaches.
• Public repo stewardship at github.com/ligate-io. Code review, contributor docs, the engineering side of conferences and design-partner conversations. The repo is public on purpose. Protocol legitimacy lives there.

A normal week, post-funding: half the time deep in Rust on a hard correctness problem, the other half pairing with a design partner on schema design or reviewing a contributor PR. We'll be a small team for a while. Pre-seed buys 12 to 18 months of runway and probably one more engineer after that.

You'd be a fit if

• 5+ years engineering, with recent Rust at the protocol or systems level. Not "I read the Rust book once". Production code in a codebase where bugs hurt.
• Hands-on with Substrate, Cosmos SDK, Sovereign SDK, or a comparable modular blockchain framework. Sovereign SDK specifically is rare and ramp-up is fine.
• Comfortable reading consensus papers (Tendermint, HotStuff, Narwhal/Bullshark, AlephBFT) and translating them into code, not just running someone else's binary.
• Solid grounding in applied cryptography: signatures, hashing, commitment schemes, Merkle trees. Bonus for zk-proof systems (Plonky, Halo, Risc0, SP1).
• Comfortable working publicly. The code is open, the design is open, you'd be visible in commits, reviews, and eventually posts.

Big bonuses

• Contributions to a live public chain or research-grade protocol.
• Published research, technical writing, conference talks.
• Network in Celestia, Cosmos SDK, Substrate, or Sovereign Labs orbits.
• Strong opinions on consensus design that you'll defend in a PR review.

Compensation

Equity from day one. Salary is $0 until pre-seed closes (we're raising $500K to $1M now, conversations in progress). Once pre-seed lands, market-rate co-founder salary follows. Wellfound salary range below reflects post-funding compensation.

How to apply

Email [email protected] with:

1. A link to something you've shipped on-chain (the repo, not just a project page).
2. Your GitHub.
3. One paragraph on what you'd want to own that I haven't written down here.

Read the PoUA paper first: github.com/ligate-io/ligate-research/blob/main/papers/poua/poua.pdf. The point of this conversation is to find someone who has opinions about it.