FOUNDER & CEO, AXION INDUSTRIAL // LONDON, U.K.

Dominic Ryder

Lead author of ERC-7621, the Basket Token Standard. Twelve years across derivatives trading, wealth management, venture capital, on-chain markets, tokenisation & distributed systems. Now building zero-knowledge verification infrastructure for autonomous systems in defence & aviation.

Current focus

STATUS: ACTIVE // FULL-TIME

Axion Industrial

Axion Industrial is commercialising a new zero-knowledge proof system that compiles first-order logic directly to polynomials, removing the virtual machine from the proving stack. The result is up to a 10,000x improvement in proving cost & speed, with the goal of reaching the efficiency to run on ARM Cortex-class embedded hardware. Applied to safety-to-liveness conversion, it lets an autonomous system prove in real time that it is operating inside its certified envelope. Target verticals are defence autonomy, civil aviation & regulated AI.

Co-founded with a 2019 Alonzo Church Prize winner (PhD Computer Science, Cambridge; formerly StarkWare & IOHK).

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Named work

DESIGNATION: ERC-7621 // ROLE: LEAD AUTHOR & CO-FOUNDER

ERC-7621 & Alvara Protocol

ERC-7621 is published on the Ethereum EIP registry. It lets anyone deploy & manage an on-chain basket of ERC-20 tokens, earn fees & accept external contributions, with every basket minting its own transferable LP token so a successful manager can build a sub-protocol on top: liquidity, staking, governance, lending, derivatives. Alvara Protocol is the standard's reference implementation & infrastructure layer: one open leaderboard where performance is the only credential. Raised $3.6M across private & public rounds.

ROLE: FOUNDER // 2021-2026

VEMP Group

Founded in 2021 with a £20,000 budget. The Founding Soldiers NFT campaign hid a hundred-character puzzle across the collection's unlockable content, forcing holders to collaborate & drawing organic coverage from Forbes. The 720 ETH presale sold out in under five minutes with zero paid marketing, & $VEMP reached a $600M fully diluted valuation at peak. The group grew into VEMP Horizon, a gaming-focused rollup with live titles including Antara Raiders & Royals (sharing IP with a major upcoming feature film), Warring Tribes & Penguin Kart, alongside the VEMP Arcade hub.

ROLE: FOUNDER // NON-PROFIT

The Other Party

A UK-registered political party building direct democracy on-chain, with a proof-of-donation memorabilia token in place of traditional fundraising merchandise.

Unnamed work

Some of my work was launched pseudonymously after 2021, & it stays that way. The descriptions below are deliberately imprecise: scale bands instead of figures, mechanics in outline only, no names, tickers, dates or chains.

DESIGNATION: WITHHELD // STATUS: LIVE, AUTONOMOUS

A DeFi protocol engineered so that nobody, including its creator, can alter it: immutable contracts, no admin keys, no team required. Bootstrapped with zero venture capital & zero paid marketing, it went from a near-dead valuation to a nine-figure market capitalisation in a matter of days & became one of the most widely discussed DeFi assets of its cycle. Its mechanics have moved millions in value since launch, & it runs today exactly as deployed.

DESIGNATION: WITHHELD // STATUS: LIVE, AUTONOMOUS

Further pseudonymous work includes a governance-directed grants protocol paying variable on-chain rewards to individual contributors, & an experiment built around adversarial incentives.

Names & specifics withheld by design. Verifiable privately.

Open for collaboration or sale

Five ventures built inside my studio, each taken to MVP, now open to new owners or partners. Structure is flexible: an outright sale to an operator, a majority sale with me staying on to deliver, or co-founding with the right person.

SECTOR: CREATOR ECONOMY // STATUS: LIVE AUDITED PRODUCT // DESKTOP & MOBILE APPS

I Dare You

A crowdfunded challenge marketplace for live-stream creators. Anyone can post a dare on a creator, the community pools money into on-chain escrow, the creator completes it on stream & settlement happens automatically after an optimistic dispute window. Shipped across web & mobile, contracts deployed & tested, with a prediction-market layer designed in.

SECTOR: DEFI / INSURANCE // STATUS: AUDIT-READY DESKTOP PRODUCT

FairClaim

A decentralised protection protocol covering life, critical illness & income cover, designed so customers & financial advisers interact with it the way they would with a conventional insurer. The full smart-contract suite (policies, premiums, claims, broker flows, multi-sig treasury) is deployed & end-to-end tested on testnet. Audit & frontend complete the MVP.

SECTOR: DEPIN / INTELLIGENCE // STATUS: MVP LIVE

NodeWeb

A decentralised intelligence network of software-defined-radio nodes capturing public radio broadcasts (aviation, maritime, emergency services) & converting them into a verified real-time feed. Node operators earn from their geographic position. Dashboard live & node hardware supply secured.

SECTOR: DATA / ORACLES // STATUS: MVP LIVE

Dark Markets

Real-time price intelligence for the world's informal & unregulated markets, produced by a distributed oracle network with prediction-market price discovery layered on top. Built for the researchers, public-health bodies & policy & enforcement agencies who work from data that is one to two years old by the time it reaches them.

SECTOR: PREDICTION MARKETS // STATUS: AUDIT-READY DESKTOP PRODUCT

ACCA Protocol

An accumulator layer for prediction markets. Users combine multiple outcomes into a single wager, minted as a tradeable position token that can be sold, traded or cashed out before full resolution. The build ships two modes, a true accumulator settled against a liquidity pool & a multi-bet variant, both live behind a functional frontend.

Advisory & consulting

Axion has my full-time focus. Alongside it I can take a small number of paid advisory & consulting engagements: protocol & token design, digital-asset strategy for institutions, go-to-market for crypto-native products & interim operating work.

Track record

Before any of the above: a London derivatives desk from 2014, junior broker to Senior Trader & Head of Desk, more than 200 staff hired & managed. Associate Partner at St James's Place Wealth Management. Four years in asset-backed venture capital at Downing LLP, a thesis of hard downside protection that later shaped how I design protocol treasuries & risk floors. Full-time on-chain since 2021.

CISI qualified. HackerNoon's 2021 Centralisation Vanquisher of the Year & 2021 Startup Contributor of the Year.

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