---
layout: ../layouts/Base.astro
title: Work — Jesse Anderson
description: ADA Handles, HAL, K.O.R.A., OpenClaw, Papagoose, AI tooling. The work shipped.
slug: work
---

<main class="work">

<PageHeader eyebrow="Work" title="The work shipped.">
Three peer products on Cardano — ADA Handles, HAL, and K.O.R.A. — plus side products and earlier engineering. Most of [github.com/koralabs](https://github.com/koralabs) is mine, outside of front-end work that the frontend team owns. The personal AI tooling that runs alongside this lives on [/projects](/projects).
</PageHeader>

<Project eyebrow="ADA Handles" title="Custom wallet addresses on Cardano, secured on-chain." featured={true}>

Co-founded with my second-eldest son in 2021. I run platform engineering and the AI ops layer.

<ProjectStats stats={[
    ['265K+', 'address-resolution NFTs'],
    ['70K+', 'wallets resolved'],
    ['10K', 'NFT collection with updateable mint/edit'],
    ['All', 'major Cardano wallets adopted']
]} />

The platform is a constellation of services across the [`handle.me`](https://handle.me) namespace. The work in impact terms:

- **Killed the centralized mint server.** Anyone can mint or edit a handle on-chain within the contract's rules. Every major Cardano wallet adopted the pattern. *(`decentralized-minting`, `handles-personalization`, `cip-68-444-minting`, `cip-68-222-minting`.)*
- **The withdraw-0 / observer trick — contracts that upgrade in place.** Worked out the Cardano technique that lets a live contract have its logic upgraded without moving the locked UTxOs to a new address. This is what makes our cutover work without state migration or chain downtime. *(Currently shipping live in `handles-personalization`.)*
- **Two parallel cutovers off Helios.** Smart contracts moving to **Aiken** for type safety and auditability — DeMi and SubHandles are on Aiken; Personalization not yet. The TX-building library moving to **`@cardano-sdk/*`**.
- **OAuth-over-NFT-ownership.** A wallet holding a handle can act as an OAuth identity provider — Web2 SSO ergonomics on self-custody wallets, no custodian. I pioneered Lit at Kora Labs in this codebase; the patterns echo through to my [`lambda-site-template`](https://github.com/papag00se/lambda-site-template) (which this site is built on). *(`auth.handle.me`.)*
- **Merkle Patricia Tries inside on-chain code.** Ported a non-trivial cryptographic structure into a Cardano-targeting language so contracts can prove membership over large datasets without storing them on-chain. *(`merkle-patricia-forestry-helios`.)*
- **Browserless dynamic SVG rendering at scale.** Every handle's NFT image is generated server-side via typographic SVG — hundreds of thousands of unique renders across reissues and personalization. *(`handle-svg`, `render.handle.me`.)*
- **Cardano Node on AWS Fargate (ran in production; retired for cost).** `cardano-node`, Ogmios, and the Handles API on Fargate + EFS for redundancy, failover, auto-scaling, and reproducible deployment. The fun trick: cross-host node-socket connectivity solved via `socat` bridging Unix domain sockets to TCP. Production-grade serverless ops on a chain that didn't expect to be run that way. Eventually retired — Fargate at this scale wasn't sustainable on the bill — but the technique still travels.
- **IPFS content validation inside on-chain code.** A Cardano smart contract can validate the contents of an IPFS file by matching the CIDv1 embedded hash against redeemer-supplied bytes — with care around chunk size and the ~1KB–12KB sweet spot. Live in production for personalization.
- **Discord as the production control plane.** Tickets, deploys, alerts, and ban decisions flow through Discord. Built the bot, the CloudWatch → Discord alerting pipeline, and the deploy automation operators trigger from chat threads. *(See K.O.R.A. below for the autonomous-agent layer on top.)*

<ImagePlaceholder note="ADA Handle visual — typography-led NFT grid" />

</Project>

<Project eyebrow="HAL — Handle Augmented Lifeform" title="One of the best minting experiences on Cardano." featured={true}>

A second product line built on the on-chain primitives Handles introduced. SDK + minting engine + 3D-asset support, so external Cardano teams can ship NFT collections without rebuilding the contracts and orchestration we already battle-tested.

<ProjectStats stats={[
    ['~4K', 'transactions chained in a single run'],
    ['70K+', 'tokens minted'],
    ['8 / 9', 'scripts and ref inputs per tx'],
    ['100%', 'deterministic settlement']
]} />

**The single most validating run (June 2025):** chained ~4,000 transactions minting 70K+ tokens in a single coordinated session. Every tx relied on the previous, with 8 scripts and 9 reference inputs each. *We were minting faster than the chain settled.* Every transaction landed deterministically.

For Cardano peers: this is what production-grade minting looks like when the contract chain, the engine, and the SDK are all yours. The minting infrastructure unified back to power Handles minting too — [`minting.handle.me`](https://minting.handle.me) serves both. *(Repo cluster: `hal.handle.me`, `hal-minting-engine`, `hal-minting-contracts`, `hal-sdk`, `hal-glb`, `minting.handle.me`.)*

<ImagePlaceholder note="HAL minting — chained-transaction visualization or 3D asset render" />

</Project>

<Project eyebrow="K.O.R.A. — Knowledge and Operations Response Assistant" title="Autonomous Discord ops agent for production Cardano.">

A multi-component AI agent that runs day-to-day ops for the Handles ecosystem from inside Discord — ticket triage, moderation, monitoring, alert response, deployment orchestration, knowledge synthesis.

**Architecture:** chat gate → AI provider → executor → worker. Multi-model routing with graceful fallback: cloud primary → codex-spark on usage cap → gpt-5.4-mini → local Qwen3 on dual GPUs (4B for the gate, 9B-IQ4_XS for the worker, 35B for harder reasoning when there's headroom).

**Discipline:** three-tier test battery — hermetic (mocks) → real-process (test services) → live-canary (live data, no side effects). Nothing ships green-by-inference.

**Working mode:** *set me loose all night.* TODO + TASK_STATE files keep autonomous runs resumable across crashes, compactions, and OAuth expirations. The agent rehydrates from disk.

**Discord-as-control-plane is intentional.** Pinned messages in `#kora-settings` are configuration. App-alerts post to `#app-alerts` with rich metadata for triage. Natural-language commands ("deploy to mainnet," "troubleshoot this ticket") trigger real CI/CD and GitHub work. *(Repo: `kora-bot`. Plus `cloudwatch-to-discord`, `community-jobs`. Detail on [/projects](/projects).)*

<ImagePlaceholder note="K.O.R.A. — Discord ticket flow, screenshot of operator action" />

</Project>

<Project eyebrow="Papagoose LLC" title="Side products.">

[clicked.bio](https://clicked.bio) — a LinkTree alternative with Instagram integration. [remindsly.com](https://remindsly.com) — Microsoft Graph-based reminders.

</Project>

<Project eyebrow="Other Kora Labs surfaces" title="Also shipping.">

A few more things in the [github.com/koralabs](https://github.com/koralabs) constellation worth knowing about:

- **Marketplace** ([marketplace.handle.me](https://marketplace.handle.me)) — secondary trading for Handles and HAL, on-chain order escrow.
- **HandleChat** ([chat.handle.me](https://chat.handle.me)) — direct messaging on Handle identity.
- **Social Secrets Restore** ([secrets.handle.me](https://secrets.handle.me)) — account recovery via social trust graphs. Research stage.
- **Merch** ([merch.handle.me](https://merch.handle.me)) and **Metaverse** ([metaverse.handle.me](https://metaverse.handle.me)) — announced.

</Project>

<PriorWork lede="Earlier engineering at scale, before Kora Labs.">

### Capital One — Master Platform Engineer (2018–2022)

25K records/sec synthetic-data Kafka platform on Fargate autoscaling. Constant vulnerability monitoring + threat scoring across team systems.

### Xero — Senior SWE & DevOps (2013–2018)

100+ two-week sprints on a 2M-user SaaS accounting/payroll platform. Built contextual auto-complete search over 2M objects on AWS ElasticSearch, queried dozens of times per second.

</PriorWork>

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