The studio bench: monitor, oscilloscope, a board under test on the soldering mat, cables below the desk

Franzen Research, Engineering & Development

Prototypes, from bench to production.

Prototyping and embedded development, protocol research, scientific computing, data digitization, electronics repair and modification, infrastructure and validator operations, security and reverse engineering, technical leadership, and teaching.

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The studio

F.R.E.D. is a prototype studio in Zug, Switzerland. It takes on the work that sits between a sketch and a product: the first board, the firmware that brings it up, the data pipeline behind it, and the infrastructure that keeps it running once it has left the lab.

The studio grew out of a decade of neuroscience and academic engineering and a second career in protocol engineering. It co-developed the implementable Polkadot specification at the Web3 Foundation, led research and infrastructure for Substrate-, Ethereum- and Solana-based networks through to mainnet launch, and keeps one foot on the bench throughout.

Work spans the whole stack: hardware and software development, cloud and bare-metal infrastructure, data analysis and machine learning, embedded systems, security and reverse engineering, and prototype manufacturing. Reproducible builds with Nix are the default, so what leaves the bench can be rebuilt by someone else.

Prototyping and embedded development
Schematic and PCB in KiCad, then the firmware and host software that make the first unit useful: ESP32, Teensy and other microcontrollers, CAN, I²C and SPI, real-time Linux, bring-up and board support.
Protocol research and specification
Specifications that independent teams can implement, with conformance tests to prove it; consensus and cryptography reviews; tokenomics and game-theory checks before a design ships to mainnet.
Scientific computing and computer vision
Acquisition, analysis pipelines and machine learning on the data a lab or product actually produces: electrophysiology, spike sorting, 3-D reconstruction from video, GPU-accelerated where it pays.
Data digitization
Analogue tape recovered into clean digital archives: the RF signal captured with CXADC and decoded with VHS-Decode instead of a capture card, dropouts repaired in software, every file checksummed and documented.
Electronics repair, modification and refurbishment
Component-level repair of lab and studio equipment; consoles and other consumer hardware recapped, modded and upgraded with modchips, HDMI and flash: the work nobody writes service manuals for.
Infrastructure and validator operations
NixOS-declared bare metal and cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD and the networks underneath; validators and RPC nodes for Substrate and Solana with offline keys. Monitored, documented, handed over runnable.
Security and reverse engineering
Hardening and incident response in operations; binary analysis with Ghidra and IDA Pro, fuzzing and protocol dissection in research; consumer hardware reverse-engineered so it can be extended.
Technical leadership and due diligence
The technical side of product strategy: roadmaps, hiring, partner and exchange integrations; research and code reviews for investors and product teams, and the articles and specifications that follow.
Teaching and workshops
Cryptography, economics and blockchain at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy; 3-D printing, CAD and microcontrollers for TReND in Africa; tutoring and lab courses before that.

Languages: Rust
C/C++
Python
Go
TypeScript
Haskell
JavaScript
Java
SQL
Bash
Matlab
Julia
Ruby
Lisp
Blockchain: Substrate
Polkadot
PolkaVM
Solana
Anchor
Ethereum
Solidity
Hardhat
WASM
MEV
Cryptography
Tokenomics
libp2p
IPFS
Frameworks: Tokio
Tonic
Qt
Boost
Asio
JUCE
OpenCV
NumPy
Jupyter
Kaitai Struct
ROS
Infrastructure: Nix/NixOS
Linux (Debian, Arch)
macOS
Windows
Kubernetes
Helm
Docker/Podman
Ansible
CI/CD
Networking
Cisco
Active Directory
Hardware: KiCad
ESP32
Teensy
Arduino
CAN
I²C/SPI
RT-Linux
Soldering
3D printing
OpenSCAD
Blender
Smart cards
CXADC
VHS-Decode
Console modding
Web: TypeScript
React
GraphQL
HTML/CSS
Zola
Hugo
Jekyll
jQuery
Tooling: Git
SVN
CMake
Ghidra
IDA Pro
Fuzzing
AsciiDoc
Doxygen
LaTeX
Homebrew
DataJoint
Science: ROCm
Ollama
LSD-SLAM
Bayesian modelling
Spike sorting
Electrophysiology

Clients

Projects

All projects →

Mind the Gap
active

Tools and a NixOS live image for painless airgapping of secrets and keys: smart-card keys derived from a 24-word mnemonic, entirely offline.

Author · 2021–2026Source
NeuroSuite
active

NeuroScope, Klusters and NDManager: desktop tools for viewing, sorting and managing electrophysiology recordings.

Major contributor · 2015–2020Source
nixpkgs
active

Package maintenance in the Nix ecosystem: a hundred-odd pull requests since 2019, a dozen packages and a NixOS module under the studio's name.

Maintainer · 2019–2026Source
Polkadot Protocol Specification
archived

The implementable specification of the Polkadot host, written so that independent teams could build compatible clients from the document alone.

Lead author · 2020–2023Source
asciidoctor-kaitai
maintained

An Asciidoctor extension that lets a document carry its own Kaitai Struct binary format definitions, compiled and drawn as diagrams on the page.

Author · 2022–2026Source
btrborg
maintained

Back up the latest btrbk snapshots into borg repositories: consistent, deduplicated, encrypted off-site archives of btrfs subvolumes.

Author · 2021–2026Source