Join us in building the decentralized web.
Great ideas don’t grow on trees, but exceptional talent combined with our experience helps identify market gaps and opportunities. We are looking for ambitious pre-founders to join Equilibrium as Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR).
Reach out to Hannes if you’d like to learn more.
Who Are You?
As an EIR at Equilibrium, we support you in finding the right problem to solve and help develop an idea into a fully-fledged product. But who are you?
Someone tinkering with ideas after work or maybe already working on an idea full-time
Self-motivated, gritty, and not afraid to get your hands dirty
Technical enough to hack together an initial prototype
Bias towards action and urgency to get things done
How Can We Help You?
With 60+ senior protocol engineers across all Equilibrium Group companies (Labs, Eiger, and Ventures) and 6+ years of experience building in the space, we have worked with most tech stacks across a wide range of ecosystems.
This, combined with our first-hand experience incubating and scaling multiple startups in the blockchain space (such as zkCloud and Membrane Finance), gives us a unique perspective on open problems in the space and the ability to support you with various challenges.
Our core value-add is on the technical side, as well as our understanding of the broader blockchain infra-space. With experts in cryptography, distributed systems design, and high-performance engineering, we can:
Help you think through the problem space and existing implementations
Provide thoughtful and objective feedback on different design choices
Support implementation and help you set strong foundations from the start
Other areas of support include:
Weekly feedback sessions (both engineering and product/go-to-market)
Support with recruiting and building an engineering team
Help with corporate setup and all operations-related things to running a startup
Fundraising support and introductions to our network of investors
Program Structure
You can think of our EIR program as a pre-seed investment with significant tangible value-add to help you succeed.
Contrary to many other EIR programs, we don’t expect you to commit any time to internal projects or work with our portfolio companies. Instead, we want you to focus full-time on exploring and prototyping ideas. We are also not running a cohort-based EIR program, which means we can dedicate more time and resources to help you succeed.
Duration: 6 months
Timing: Ongoing (no specific start date)
Compensation: Salary + operational costs
Location: Remote (but our Helsinki office is open if you want to work from there)
Interesting Areas To Work On
While you’ll have complete freedom to explore any topic, some areas that we’ve thought about recently include:
Crypto x AI: As AI becomes more widely adopted and integrated into our lives, the risks of closed-source and centrally controlled models magnify. We believe there are still interesting opportunities in decentralized training and inference, as well as governance and monetization of open-source models. In addition, the rapid improvement of generative AI increases the urgency of creating tools for verifying content authenticity.
Privacy: While programmable privacy infrastructure is evolving, many problems remain. Simultaneously, as the infrastructure improves, new use cases and applications become feasible, enabling us to escape the Fermi paradox.
Defi: As the industry moves from speculation to utility, new opportunities open up. We’ve previously explored areas such as under-collateralized lending and borrowing against a broader range of assets, payment infrastructure, and asset tokenization, but we’re interested in any ideas that help advance the adoption of Internet Finance.
Leveraging ZKP Outside of Blockchains: While ZKPs found their first major PMF within blockchains (privacy and scaling), we believe the potential of ZKPs is much larger. This belief led us to incubate zkCloud, which provides on-demand compute for any prover and proof system. With all parts of the proving infrastructure rapidly improving, the time is right to explore applications and real-world use cases leveraging ZKPs.
Innovative Base Layer Designs: Despite 10+ years of development, we still believe that no base layer (in its current form) can provide sufficient capabilities regarding scaling, programmability, privacy, UX, and security.
If any of these resonate with you or if you have another idea that excites you, we’d love to hear from you.
About Us
Since 2018, Equilibrium has been building core infrastructure for blockchains and distributed systems. With partners such as Aleo, Celestia, Starknet, zkSync, and others, we’ve tackled challenges related to scaling, privacy, and security.
We also have first-hand experience incubating and scaling ventures in the space, including Labs and Eiger (engineering consultancy), zkCloud (a generalized proving network), and Membrane Finance (issuer of the first MiCa-regulated Euro-stablecoin, acquired by Paxos in 2024).
Continue reading
March 10, 2025
From Speculation to Utility: Next Steps For Onchain Lending Markets
Despite its promises, onchain lending still mostly caters to crypto-natives and provides little utility besides speculation. This post explores a path to gradually move to more productive use cases, low-hanging fruit, and challenges we might face.
February 18, 2025
Can Blockchains And Cryptography Solve The Authenticity Challenge?
As gen-AI models improve, it's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between AI- and human-generated content. This piece dives into whether cryptography and blockchains can solve the authenticity challenge and help restore trust on the Internet
February 6, 2025
Vertical Integration for both Ethereum and ETH the Asset
In recent months, lackadaisical price action and usage growing on other L1/L2s has driven a discussion on what Ethereum’s role and the value of ETH, the asset is long-term.
January 29, 2025
Equilibrium: Building and Funding Core Infrastructure For The Decentralized Web
Combining Labs (our R&D studio) and Ventures (our early-stage venture fund) under one unified brand, Equilibrium, enables us to provide more comprehensive support to early-stage builders and double down on our core mission of building the decentralized web
November 28, 2024
20 Predictions For 2025
For the first time, we are publishing our annual predictions for what will happen by the end of next year and where the industry is headed. Joint work between the two arms of Equilibrium - Labs and Ventures.
November 7, 2024
9 + 1 Open Problems In The Privacy Space
In the third (and final) part of our privacy series, we explore nine open engineering problems in the blockchain privacy space in addition to touching on the social/regulatory challenges.
October 15, 2024
Aleo Mainnet Launch: Reflecting On The Journey So Far, Our Contributions And Path Ahead
Equilibrium started working with Aleo back in 2020 when ZKPs were still mostly a theoretical concept and programmable privacy in blockchains was in its infancy. Following Aleo's mainnet launch, we reflect on our journey and highlight key contributions.
August 12, 2024
Do All Roads Lead To MPC? Exploring The End-Game For Privacy Infrastructure
This post argues that the end-game for privacy infra falls back to the trust assumptions of MPC, if we want to avoid single points of failure. We explore the maturity of MPC & its trust assumptions, highlight alternative approaches, and compare tradeoffs.
June 12, 2024
What Do We Actually Mean When We Talk About Privacy In Blockchain Networks (And Why Is It Hard To Achieve)?
An attempt to define what we mean by privacy, exploring how and why privacy in blockchain networks differs from web2, and why it's more difficult to achieve. We also provide a framework to evaluate different approaches for achieveing privacy in blockchain.
April 9, 2024
Will ZK Eat The Modular Stack?
Modularity enables faster experimentation along the tradeoff-frontier, wheras ZK provides stronger guarantees. While both of these are interesting to study on their own, this post explores the cross-over between the two.
October 5, 2023
Overview of Privacy Blockchains & Deep Dive Of Aleo
Programmable privacy in blockchains is an emergent theme. This post covers what privacy in blockchains entail, why most blockchains today are still transparent and more. We also provide a deepdive into Aleo - one of the pioneers of programmable privacy!
March 12, 2023
2022 Year In Review
If you’re reading this, you already know that 2022 was a tumultuous year for the blockchain industry, and we see little value in rehashing it. But you probably also agree with us that despite many challenges, there’s been a tremendous amount of progress.
May 31, 2022
Testing the Zcash Network
In early March of 2021, a small team from Equilibrium Labs applied for a grant to build a network test suite for Zcash nodes we named Ziggurat.
June 30, 2021
Connecting Rust and IPFS
A Rust implementation of the InterPlanetary FileSystem for high performance or resource constrained environments. Includes a blockstore, a libp2p integration which includes DHT contentdiscovery and pubsub support, and HTTP API bindings.
June 13, 2021
Rebranding Equilibrium
A look back at how we put together the Equilibrium 2.0 brand over four months in 2021 and found ourselves in brutalist digital zen gardens.
January 20, 2021
2021 Year In Review
It's been quite a year in the blockchain sphere. It's also been quite a year for Equilibrium and I thought I'd recap everything that has happened in the company with a "Year In Review" post.