About
Building a consumer product, in stealthToronto
I'm Nikshep, based in Toronto. I explore ideas by building them, at the edges of AI, crypto, and markets.
Infinitely curious, delusional optimist. Right now that's pointed at a consumer product I can't talk about yet. Away from the keyboard: techno, psydub, and mountains with friends.
- 2exits
- $50M+protocol volume
- 790K+search impressions
- 1,490GitHub stars
- 1.2Marticle views
Featured in
Bloomberg
Business Insider
The AI Journal
NYU Shanghai RITS
The Agent Times
PYMNTS
Ventures
4 ventures2 exits
I built 
HumanPlane, a chart room for prediction markets, and 
Moltlaunch, a work protocol for agents. I exited 
RealmPlay, and 
SoulBazaar was acquired before it launched.
-
HumanPlane · shipped
$250K+platform volume
The chart room for prediction markets. Polymarket and Kalshi in one place — whale flows, AI research, and signals that move before the news.
Kalshi grant recipientFeatured in BloombergRan Horizon S1, a Solana trading comp with Kalshi + DFlow
-
Moltlaunch · shipped
$50M+platform volume
Fiverr for agents. An agent work protocol with custom escrow, job matching, and payments.
-
RealmPlay · exited
Mid 5-fig ARRbootstrapped · West Mountain AI
AI storytelling platform on a custom fine-tuned LLM running on consumer-grade GPUs.
-
SoulBazaar · acquired
$5M+post-acquisition token market cap
Autonomous AI influencer platform for crypto tokens & communities. Acquired pre-launch.
Experience
7 roles2016–2026
I was a 
Kalshi Builder Fellow, and before going independent spent three years as a senior engineer and tech lead at 
Instacart. Earlier, data infrastructure internships at 
Coinbase, 
Deliverr, 
SeatGeek, and 
PagerDuty, and computer science at 
Waterloo.
-
KalshiBuilder Fellow
Jan — Feb 2026
Built HumanPlane through the Kalshi Builder Fellowship, integrating prediction markets via DFlow and working with the crypto and engineering teams.
-
InstacartSenior SWE / Tech Lead · Enterprise Ads
2021 — 2024
Led 10+ engineers across Enterprise Ads. Scaled measurement and experimentation, shipped multi-touch attribution, and helped launch the first Carrot Ads partner.
-
DeliverrSWE Intern · Fulfillment Network
Fall 2020
Built the foundation for fulfillment services to move from pull-based updates to an event-driven data flow powered by Kinesis.
-
CoinbaseSWE Intern · Data Platform
Summer 2020
Rebuilt financial-data ETL as a Scala/Spark pipeline with batch and streaming modes, replacing legacy Java and Kotlin jobs. Received a full-time return offer.
-
SeatGeekData Infrastructure Intern
Fall 2019
Built the migration from Redshift to a Parquet-based S3 data lake, plus production Spark tools for dynamic EMR clusters and SQL access.
-
PagerDutySWE Intern, Core Infra & ML Platform
2018 — 2019
Built an Elixir service and Spark query layer for event data. Earlier, worked on the SQL-to-Kafka service supporting the move to microservices.
- MagmicSWE Intern · Backend Services Summer 2017 Reworked service authorization, added rate and bot filtering, and built a test app for the internal Dark Matter SDK.
-
University of WaterlooBCS, Computer Science
2016 — 2021
Six internships during the program. Dean’s Honour List, President’s Scholarship of Distinction, and Velocity Entrepreneurial Residence.
Projects
22 projects1,490 stars
Some of it finds a real audience: modelgrep and viberank both pull steady search traffic, and homunculus helped inspire the learning system in everything-claude-code.
On the research side, thimble puts structured tool calling into a 48M-parameter model, bankai adapts 1-bit LLMs with tiny XOR patches, and I built the orchestrator behind MC-Bench. Upstream, two of my fixes ship in Nous Research's Hermes Agent. In all: 1,490 GitHub stars across 22 projects.
Starred and followed by 1,521 developers in 50 countries, including people at
Google
Microsoft
Meta
Apple
Amazon
NVIDIA
Vercel
Stripe
Airbnb
SpaceX
Tencent
ByteDance
Atlassian141 United States32 Germany32 China28 Canada28 United Kingdom20 India14 Japan12 Australia+42 more countries
Also on the list: the creators of everything-claude-code, tokscale, Sablier, Rainbow and egghead.io.
Products
live, with real traffic- modelgrepllm benchmarks · model discovery Compare 300+ LLMs by intelligence, speed, price, and capability. Live provider data, independent benchmarks, and a free public API. 603KGoogle impressions since launch11.4Ksearch clicks since launch250Kimpressions in the last 28 days alone
- viberankai coding · usage analytics The public AI coding leaderboard. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and more — ranked by real token usage and API-equivalent spend. 1,292developers ranked26Ttokens tracked$20.3MAPI-equivalent spend measured189KGoogle impressions since May 2026
Research
models, papers, and agents- thimblesmall models · structured tool calls A 48M-parameter tool-calling layer. Grammar-constrained decoding keeps JSON well-formed, argument names valid, and calls inside your tool catalog.
- bankai1-bit llms · model adaptation Adapt frozen 1-bit LLMs with reversible XOR patches measured in bytes. Paper, MLX implementation, and a CUDA path for NVIDIA GPUs.
- cross-market-state-fusionreinforcement learning · prediction markets Online PPO agent combining Binance order flow with Polymarket books. Trains on Apple Silicon and paper-trades four crypto markets.
- MC-Benchllm evaluation · infrastructure Built the core orchestrator for MC-Bench: concurrent, containerized Minecraft builds that people compare to evaluate LLMs.
- veilstreamllm privacy · streaming Streaming PII proxy with session-scoped pseudonyms and live reversal. PASP uses cryptographic anchors to prevent false attribution.
Open source
tools people star and fork- homunculusclaude code · adaptive agents A Claude Code plugin that learns from your prompts and tool use. Turns observed patterns into reusable instincts, skills, and commands.
- terminalpolymarket · trading infrastructure Self-hosted Polymarket terminal with live order books, trader history, and wallet-signed orders. Rust backend, keyboard-driven interface.
- openvenicemultimodal ai · visual workflows A self-hostable Venice AI frontend for chat, images, audio, music, and video. Chain models in a visual workflow editor; everything runs in the browser.
- scrimclaude code · codex · context efficiency Tool-output thinning for coding agents. Preserves failure signals, stashes originals for retrieval, and tracks where your context goes.
- moltlaunchagents · onchain coordination Agent coordination on Base. Evolved from a token-trading swarm into a work protocol with verifiable identity, job matching, and escrow payments.
- updownarenamarket simulation · bot competition Paper-trading arena for Polymarket 15-minute up/down markets. Bots trade live orderbooks; a leaderboard shows who's winning.
- near-hydrachain abstraction · cli + mcp Unofficial CLI and MCP server for NEAR. Derive accounts, sign transactions, and swap across chains through Chain Signatures and Intents.
- blindcacheencrypted memory · mcp Encrypted agent memory on Nillion. Content is secret-shared across nilDB nodes and reconstructed by the client; metadata stays queryable.
- blindchatprivate inference · browser ai Browser chat combining Venice TEE inference with BlindCache memory. Embeddings run locally in the tab, with memory tools for native and non-native models.
- nemo-ailocal memory · temporal reasoning Local-first MCP memory with SQLite and Ollama. Resolves contradictory facts, tracks when memories were true, and explains retrieval decisions.
Earlier products
- tremormarket intelligence · anomaly detection Real-time volatility monitor for prediction markets. Scores sudden moves and uses social context to help explain what changed.
- sniffchainmulti-agent systems · onchain research Token & wallet research terminal. Multi-agent system on X for in-feed trade, send, research. ~5k users, fully organic.
- clip.funcreator markets · tokenomics The market for imagination. Democratizing creativity for the AI age. Novel tokenomics.
- Spineagent infrastructure · x402 + mcp Agent coordination mesh with discovery, reputation, and self-healing: the OpenMesh research, built as an MVP on x402 and MCP.
- dreamloomgenerative media · interactive storytelling AI-native storytelling with video, narration, music, and subtitles. Custom generative-media pipelines for coherent interactive scenes.
Search figures from Google Search Console, all data through 11 October 2026; viberank usage from viberank.app/api/stats.
Earlier workStudent projects · 2017–2020
A few small builds from university: privacy experiments, hardware, and everyday utilities.
- ScatterFly 2017 An early privacy experiment: background browser automation to add noise to browsing data.
- Caffeine 2017 A driver-alertness prototype pairing a Muse headband with an Android app.
- Echo 2017 A phone-recovery prototype using nearby users and Wi-Fi hotspot identifiers to locate a missing phone.
- Delivery availability checker 2020 A small personal utility for checking available Instacart delivery slots.
Investing
3 public calls2026
I invest in public, and in writing. I bought 
Venice around $2, when almost no one was talking about it, and sold near the $34 top. I called 
NEAR at $1.30 as the settlement layer for agents, and found 
Nillion while looking for private memory for my own agents.
-
Venice · $VVV · exitedFeb – Sep 2026
17×$2 entry → $34 exit
Bought at a $160M cap with almost no one on the timeline talking about it: a private-AI company doing $4M a month, 1.3M users, no VCs. Held through the run, then trimmed and turned short at $34 when the token started pricing in burns that hadn't happened yet.
-
NEAR · $NEAR · calledMay 2026
3.3×$1.30 call → $4.30, peak near $5
Wrote it up as the settlement and coordination layer for agents while the market was still comparing its TVL to Solana's. Chain abstraction, intents, and confidential sends were the thesis.
-
Nillion · $NIL · holdingMay 2026 –
$0.05first call, at a $25M cap
Found it while digging for private memory for agents. Sold when its private-AI approach looked weak, then re-entered at $0.04–0.05 the week it pivoted to encrypted markets.
Prices and dates are as I posted them at the time; every link goes to the original post. Full track record. Not financial advice.
Writing
31 articles7 essays and reports
I write in public: 31 long-form pieces on X with 1.2M views and 2,400+ bookmarks, from token deep dives to where AI is heading. For the longer arguments, start with Control Surface or Liquid Talent.
Most read
research and deep dives on X- Token Dispatch · guest essay The Year Crypto Stopped Needing Bitcoin 325K views14 Jun 2026 How AI, stablecoins, and onchain businesses are changing crypto’s relationship with Bitcoin. Translated by Golden Finance and TechFlow.
- NEAR Why $NEAR Captures the Agent Economy 183K views5 May 2026 A coordination-layer thesis: why agents that act across chains need one account, one settlement layer, and private intents.
- Venice · VVV I Found the Token That Sam Altman Accidentally Described 168K views15 Feb 2026 The first real breakdown of Venice on crypto Twitter, written with the token around $3.
Essays
and reports- State of AI Coding Spend 2026 June 2026Report What 792 developers actually spent on AI coding: $2.3M across 2.5T tokens.
- Control SurfaceJan 20264 min read The bottleneck isn't model intelligence anymore. It's the interface.
- The Missing Networking LayerJul 20254 min read We're at the standalone-computer-before-the-internet moment for AI.
- Liquid TalentJul 20254 min read Full-time employment is a coordination hack disguised as a natural category.
- Speculative CoordinationJul 20256 min read Memecoins coordinate better than most DAOs. That fact is worth sitting with.
- REFLEX Jul 2025Design pattern A framework for productive speculation: trading fees fund missions, and verified work burns supply.
- BLOOMJul 20254 min read A marketplace for fast ZK proofs on Solana.
Press
6 features
Bloomberg and PYMNTS wrote about HumanPlane, Business Insider about tremor, The AI Journal about Moltlaunch, NYU Shanghai about the bankai paper, and The Agent Times about near-hydra.
-
Bloomberg
Jan 2026
Crypto Traders Flee to Prediction Bets After $150 Billion Crash
-
Business Insider
Sep 2025
A New Way to Spot Tremors in Prediction Markets
-
The AI Journal
Feb 2026
Inside the Gig Economy Built for AI: Moltlaunch
-
NYU Shanghai RITS
Apr 2026
Bankai: Kilobyte-Scale Patches for 1-Bit LLMs via XOR Adaptation
-
The Agent Times
May 2026
Near-Hydra Gives Us One CLI to Transact Across 10+ Chains
-
PYMNTS
Jan 2026
Prediction Market Interest Soars as Crypto Sector Cools
Contact
TorontoEastern time
The best way to reach me is a DM on X, or email.
© 2026 Nikshep Saravanan · TorontoBack to top ↑