Smart contract development
Solidity on the EVM; Rust on Solana, Arbitrum Stylus and PolkaVM. Protocol design, implementation, upgradeability, gas and compute budgets, and test suites that hold up under audit.
Accepting new clients
Individual entrepreneur · Yerevan, Armenia · Remote, worldwide
Blockchain engineering services, delivered under contract.
Nikita Khateev PE is an independent engineering practice registered in Armenia. It builds and hardens smart contracts, Polkadot runtimes and the off-chain infrastructure around them for Web3 companies worldwide, on a project or retainer basis.
- Est. 2022individual entrepreneur, Republic of Armenia
- 2018building on blockchains since
- Polkadot · EVM · Solanaecosystems delivered to
Services
Senior-level engineering scoped as a deliverable, not a seat. Every engagement is defined in a statement of work with milestones, acceptance criteria and a fixed or time-and-materials price.
Polkadot & Substrate runtimes
Parachain runtimes, custom pallets and XCM integrations. EVM-compatible chains via Frontier, Tanssi deployments, deterministic srtool builds and reproducible runtime upgrades.
Security review & hardening
Code review, threat modelling and test coverage ahead of a formal audit. Practices shaped by years of secure-development work on audited open-source libraries, applied to client codebases.
Infrastructure & tooling
Relayers, event listeners, indexers, SDKs and developer tooling: Hardhat and Foundry plugins, Remix integrations, on-chain automation and the glue that makes a protocol usable.
Experience
Representative engagements, most of them open source. Client names and references are available on request.
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Parachain runtime templates
Audited, production-ready runtime templates for Polkadot parachains with EVM compatibility: Ethereum pallets, the EVM RPC layer, contract-migration guides, and a deterministic build pipeline kept healthy across Polkadot SDK upgrades.
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Confidential compute with FHE
Fully Homomorphic Encryption brought to Solana programs: a permit-based user-decryption flow designed end to end across the on-chain program, key-management connector, relayer and client SDK; per-application compute limits; gRPC-based event ingestion.
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Runtime composition tooling
Macro wrappers around
construct_runtime!andimpl_runtime_api!that let teams assemble a runtime from vetted building blocks. Appchain-platform support, an ERC-20 bridge abstraction over XCM, and fee payment in the relay-chain token. -
Cross-chain intent settlement
ERC-7683 intent settlement adapted to Polkadot with an XCM escrow input settler, so intents can settle across parachains. Hardhat toolchain, EVM target and CI set up from scratch.
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Developer tooling
PolkaVM support in a smart-contract upgrades plugin, a signature-validation fix in a widely used Solidity library, and fixes to a browser IDE for Solidity-to-PolkaVM compilation.
How engagements work
Nikita Khateev PE contracts directly with clients as an independent business. The terms below are the default; each services agreement can adjust them.
- Contracting entity
- Nikita Khateev PE, an individual entrepreneur registered in the Republic of Armenia since November 2022 (TIN 40618085). Each engagement is governed by a written services agreement between the client and the PE.
- Scope & pricing
- Fixed-scope statements of work or time-and-materials retainers. Milestones, deliverables and acceptance criteria are agreed in writing before work starts.
- Invoicing
- Monthly invoices issued by the PE against delivered milestones or logged hours, paid by bank transfer to the business account. Currency and payment terms are set in the services agreement.
- Working model
- Fully remote from Yerevan, asynchronous by default. The PE decides where, when and how the work is done, and bears its own equipment, software, infrastructure and business expenses.
- Who does the work
- All work is performed personally by the lead engineer, Nikita Khateev. The PE has no employees; subcontracting happens only with the client's written agreement.
- Independence & IP
- The PE is an independent business, not an employee or agent of any client, and may serve several clients concurrently. NDAs and IP assignment on request; open-source deliverables are published under the licence the client chooses.
Lead engineer
Nikita Khateev — owner and lead engineer
Nikita is a software engineer who has worked on blockchain systems since 2018, starting with Hyperledger Indy identity infrastructure and moving through EVM protocols to Polkadot runtimes and FHE-enabled chains. Since founding the practice in 2022 he has delivered long-term engagements as an independent contractor, most of them open source, in the Polkadot, EVM and Solana ecosystems.
The work he gravitates to sits between layers: a pallet that has to expose an EVM precompile, a decrypt flow that has to be authorised on-chain and executed off-chain, a build that has to be byte-for-byte reproducible. Tests first, PRs kept reviewable, documentation left behind.
Stack
Working style
- Written first. Design notes and status updates in writing, so decisions survive the call.
- Small, reviewable PRs. No thousand-line drops; every change comes with tests.
- Open source by default. Whatever the client allows to be public gets published.
Accepting new clients
Have a protocol to build or a codebase to harden?
Send a short description of the project, the timeline and a budget range. Proposals go out within two business days.