I've built and run systems at scale, and I know which early decisions come back to bite a year later.

For a team that needs a CTO's judgement before it can justify hiring one. I own the architecture and the technical hiring, and I'm the technical voice to your board and investors through launch and listing. We agree the monthly deliverables up front.

Before the money moves. You get a two-page decision brief first, then the investment-committee memo, the evidence annex and the cost to remediate, in ten business days. A red-flag read takes five.

For a decision that will be expensive to undo once it's built. One decision area, the evidence, the options and a written recommendation, in a fixed two-week sprint.

Prices and how an engagement runs are on andskur.com.

_{Architect · Wirex}

I led the delivery of a live L2 chain for a non-custodial debit card, end to end, from the indexer and oracles to account abstraction, with KYC wired in for MiCA alignment. It had to go onto live card rails without disrupting the product already running there. It's in market as Wirex Pay: self-custody card payments with no gas fees.

_{Head of Backend · Gateway.fm · Opera, 1inch, Gnosis, Ethereum Foundation}

I designed the RPC proxy, a cache layer and rate limiting in front of the chain nodes. At peak it served 140k+ requests per second in production, four clients' traffic through one proxy at 50 ms average on the heavy requests. It became a paid product that won its clients and ran on fewer nodes, with no outages at peak.

_{VP of Platform and Yield · Gateway.fm · Lido, Gnosis, Stellar, Canton}

I led the department that ran the infrastructure behind $1B+ locked in staking, built to a 99.99% uptime target. Gateway Yield became a recurring revenue line for Gateway, with funds, custodians and protocol foundations staking through it.

_{VP of Platform and Yield · Gateway.fm · Polygon zkEVM, cdk-erigon, Miden, Iden3}

I led the build of a shared prover used across several ZK protocols and L2 ecosystems, with GPU and CPU autoscaling. The GPUs ran on spot capacity that can be taken back at any time. New ecosystems were onboarded without new infrastructure, at a lower proving cost per chain.

_{VP of Platform and Yield · Gateway.fm · Polygon, Canton, Miden, Ethereum}

I designed and led an app-kit framework for fintech products, and took the RWA, stablecoin and payments kits into client delivery. The target was one month to market for a regulated fintech product, and clients launched for less than a custom build.

_{Fractional CTO · DeepNode}

I designed the infrastructure behind a decentralised AI network's token launch and exchange listing, over ten months to a fixed launch date.

_{CTO and Technical Lead · OG:Crystals, Arsnl.art, Snark.art · 15+ NFT projects}

With Uddug, which I co-founded, I built the platforms behind NFT launches that raised $100M+ in total, including two collections at $10M+ and $2M+ at launch.

Two more are on the public record: the event infrastructure and backend I led for Infinex, the Synthetix front-end, under governance proposal XIP-9, and CIP-0084 on EVM compatibility, which I presented to the Canton super-validators.

I've been writing software since I was a student, and I've never wanted to do anything else.

• 2011: First websites, built while studying at Moscow State University.
• 2014: A solar-powered mining farm, a Bitcoin faucet network and a micropayment system across three chains.
• 2015: Met my business partner and merged our companies: CRMs, web products, then a crypto ad network.
• 2017: Co-founded ICEX, a crypto exchange, on a pre-seed round. We closed it at about 70% built, when the investor pulled out.
• 2018: Co-founded Uddug and grew it to 15 people: NFT, healthcare and data security projects, plus Web3 Foundation and Protocol Labs grants.
• 2021: Joined Gateway.fm early, designed the RPC proxy, became Head of Backend.
• 2024: Gateway.fm acquired Uddug. I became VP of DLT, running about 25 people across two departments.
• 2025: Fractional CTO to DeepNode from March 2025 to January 2026, through the token launch and listing.
• 2026: Co-founded Felag, an engineering studio, with my partner, and started this practice under my own name.

argon2-hashing is a small Go package for Argon2 password hashes, and go-microservice-template is the Go service layout I start from. gitsec-backend is the backend of a git repository system on blockchain and IPFS that Uddug built in 2023. OldNorseDictionary and Runatal are two Swift apps I ship outside work. Most of my work since 2021 sits in private repositories.

Tell me what needs doing at a.skurlatov@gmail.com and I'll come back with a time for a 30-minute call. If you already know what you need, book the 30 minutes directly.

_{andskur is the independent practice of Andrew Skurlatov, Netherlands.}