Rahul Kulkarni
Software engineer building products across markets, crypto, and AI.
I build things, then write about how they actually work.
Selected work
Options Trading Infrastructure
Stealth · Present
Building an options trading platform with on-chain custody and off-chain execution across market data, order execution, positions, collateral, settlement, and payouts.
Lads
A private fitness companion for close friends.
Helps small friend groups stay accountable, sync activities, and get AI-powered fitness insights without turning health into a public feed. 500+ installs.
ClearSign
Making AI agents safe enough to move money.
Reads every transaction an AI agent wants to sign, explains it in plain language, and blocks anything that breaks your rules. Live on Solana mainnet.
Shuffles
Crypto trading that fits in your pocket.
Routes trades across seven networks behind one mobile interface, so you can find a token, swap it, and settle with one hand.
Essays
Solana Is Fast Enough That Geography Now Matters
October 2026At ~200ms slots, a far-away next leader can eat half the slot budget. SIMD-0675 groups nearby validators in the leader schedule, and the tradeoff is how much locality to add before resilience suffers.
Solana Is About to Make Inefficient Transactions Expensive
August 2026SIMD-0553 changes Solana fees from flat signature costs to resource-based pricing. Why loose compute budgets could become a user-facing cost problem.
AI Doesn't Have a Model Problem Anymore. It Has a Systems Problem.
August 2026The models are capable enough for many products now. The hard part is building the retries, state, validation, observability, and recovery around them.
About
I like building products that sit close to the infrastructure. My work has moved from mobile apps to crypto, developer tools, AI systems, and now trading infrastructure. I'd rather understand how a system actually works and ship something real on top of it than stay inside one category.
Along the way: Solana Foundation Fellow, 25+ hackathon wins, and 30+ talks at events like ETH KL and DogeCon.
More about meExperience
- Since 2026
Senior Fullstack Blockchain Developer, Stealth Derivatives Startup
Options trading with on-chain custody and an off-chain order book.
- 2024 to 2026
DevRel Lead & AI Ecosystem Architect, SOON SVM
Helped 50+ teams ship to SOON mainnet. 60M+ transactions across them.
- 2024
Solana Fellow, Solana Labs
Built CLI tooling and SPL token libraries.
Contact
Always happy to talk about trading systems, AI, crypto, or whatever you're building. Email and X are the fastest ways to reach me.