Rahul Kulkarni
Software engineer building products across markets, crypto, and AI.
Currently building trading infrastructure for a stealth derivatives startup.
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.
TypeScript, React, Convex, Go, Solidity, Base, Chainlink, GCP
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 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.
Why Most Solana DEXs Don't Use On-Chain Orderbooks
January 2026It is not a design choice. It is account locking, compute limits, and the transaction model. Why AMMs win on Solana and how perps actually work.
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.
More about meExperience
Full resumeContact
Always happy to talk about trading systems, AI, crypto, or whatever you're building. Email and X are the fastest ways to reach me.