Skip to content
Khoa Phan

Where I’ve worked and what I’ve built.

A cross-section of founder work, protocol engineering, security research, and forward-deployed product delivery across startups, independent work, and research.

Specta · Dec 2025 – Present

Software Architect & Engineer

  • Architected data pipelines that ingest and normalize live data from major sports APIs and prediction market sources, powering real-time analytics across NBA, NCAA, MLB, EPL, and other leagues.
  • Designed model-driven AI workflows that transform multi-source data into 100+ automated sports analyses per day, with guardrails for grounding, consistency, and quality.
  • Built an internal multi-agent development harness using frontier LLMs to accelerate architectural planning, code generation, and implementation of product features.

Ritual Foundation · Apr 2025 – Oct 2025

Ecosystem Engineer (Forward-Deployed)

  • Developed a provably private price-prediction application and designed its TEE state recovery mechanism using time-lock puzzles and smart contract storage to recover sensitive enclave state.
  • Owned implementation across key AI and confidential-computing prototypes, including systems for private prediction workflows, TEE-based LLM evaluation, and encrypted prompt delivery.
  • Served as a forward-deployed engineer, writing core technical specs, building reference implementations, and partnering directly with external teams to architect and ship full-stack applications.

Independent · Feb 2023 – Apr 2025

Software Engineer & Security Researcher

  • Identified and helped remediate a critical protocol-level vulnerability in Compound Finance, resulting in a $100,000 bug bounty.
  • Designed and deployed audited financial applications that routed and managed underlying asset yield while preserving user principal.
  • Built and open-sourced WERC721, an ERC-721 wrapper protocol that reduced transfer fees by up to ~90% through batching and low-level optimization.

Dinero.xyz · Dec 2021 – Feb 2023

Founding Software Engineer

  • Architected Pirex, Dinero's flagship yield-tokenization protocol, designing the core smart contract system and zero-to-one architecture that later enabled the protocol to secure $200M+ in assets and achieve institutional adoption.
  • Built Hidden Hand, a protocol for permissionless incentivization of governance actions across distributed financial ecosystems, scaling to roughly $5M in peak user assets.
  • Owned security-critical protocol development across multiple products, with responsibility spanning design, implementation, and integration.

dlab · Feb 2019 – Aug 2019

Research Fellow

  • Explored a managed node-provider model focused on simplifying metered access to hosted blockchain infrastructure.
  • Prototyped developer-facing infrastructure for the Cardano ecosystem and authored technical research on blockchain tooling bottlenecks.
  • Helped shape the early fellowship program through technical documentation and a three-part blog series on infrastructure needs for blockchain developers.

Backbone Labs · Jan 2016 – Aug 2018

Co-Founder & CEO

  • Developed a BLE-enabled wearable posture device and companion iOS application for real-time user feedback.
  • Generated $467k in Kickstarter pre-orders, joined the HAX accelerator, and worked with partners including UPS and UCSF on R&D and logistics.
  • Led hardware prototyping, manufacturing, and fulfillment, ultimately shipping 90% of pre-orders before the company shut down due to capital constraints.