Aidan Olazabal

Updated July 27, 2026

I am studying economics and data science at Yale, where I’m a member of Yale Blockchain and the Yale AI Association. I’m also a YAIA Fellow with Yale AI Alignment, digging into neural network interpretability, reinforcement learning agents, and eliciting latent knowledge.

Aligning increasingly capable AI with human intent, before it outpaces our ability to oversee it, is to me the defining technical problem of the coming decade.

  • Archetypesa founder-taxonomy platform I built to study how world-class operators are made: 120 founder profiles, 18 founder archetypes, and 247 cross-linked concepts drawn from 342 sources. It is structured on the Karpathy LLM-wiki pattern, where every founder, archetype, and concept is an addressable page wired to the others, so patterns compound across the corpus rather than sitting in isolated biographies. Built on Next.js, Tailwind, MDX, and shadcn components.
  • Harbormastera finalist at the Ledger N3XT hackathon: hardware-enforced agent authority for autonomous stablecoin settlement, picked from 50-plus submissions across 38 universities and 8 countries. The agent only proposes. A deterministic, LLM-free policy engine screens every transfer against allowlists and caps, then a Ledger clear-signs recipient and amount on its own screen. The key never leaves the device.
  • Kiokua digital-asset education company I founded while living abroad in Seoul: for six months during my gap year, I taught hundreds of retail and corporate clients across the US, Korea, and Japan how to actually use crypto, from stablecoin infrastructure and smart contracts to on-chain settlement, DeFi primitives, and the mechanics of public blockchains.
  • Zom Technologiesbuilt zom-ai, their internal AI operating system, in the mold of Ramp’s Glass and Spotify’s Honk: synchronized skills and MCP servers over an Obsidian knowledge layer (the Karpathy LLM-wiki pattern, gbrain-ready) replicated peer-to-peer over Syncthing, privacy at the path layer. Token management spans OpenRouter and the Anthropic console, routing routine work to cheaper open models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 rather than the frontier tier. Deployed from the c-suite to the entire engineering org.
  • Manaa decentralized ticketing platform on Polygon: ERC-721 tickets written in Solidity, routed against Aave v3 liquidity pools, with a fiat-to-USDC on and off ramp built on Stripe and Circle.
  • Spirala provably-fair giveaway protocol on Base: each draw commits a Merkle root of the weighted entry set before the VRF seed exists, then derives the winning leaf deterministically from seed and root, so anyone can prove inclusion, recompute exact odds from leaf weights, and replay the draw hash by hash.
  • Unmanned Industriesbuilt out their tech stack end to end: outbound sales agents driven by autonomous daemons on cron schedules, and live production dashboards that orchestrate the drone build from first part to finished aircraft. Now building a computer-vision SOP system that reads the operator's FPV goggle feed and hand signals to author the assembly playbook automatically.

  • IOSG Ventures

    2026

    Venture Capital Investment Analyst

    Early stage, thesis-led. Computing, decentralized networks, digital assets.

  • Climate Equity Foundation

    2026

    Summer Analyst

    The Enforcement Gap, a research report on green bonds and sustainable finance: how long-dated debt instruments carry environmental commitments, and what those commitments are actually worth.

  • Yale University

    2025-2029

    Economics and Data Science

  • Phillips Exeter Academy

    2020-2024

    Cum Laude and Highest Honors

  • On-chain

    since 2017

    Smart contracts and crypto products

    ERC-721 in Solidity, Aave v3 liquidity, Circle USDC ramps, constant-product bonding curves that graduate into Uniswap v3, Merkle-committed entry sets drawn against VRF with on-chain inclusion proofs, hash-chained ledgers, and clear-signed settlement on Base.

I train MMA, fish, hike, and golf; on the keyboard, I’m usually deep in David Senra’s Founders Podcast or TBPN, and bullish on American sovereignty.Late nights, I’m fine-tuning my Obsidian Vault wiki, obsessing over the skills and plugins that get the most out of my Hermes agent (Firecrawl and Exa especially), or hunting funding-rate spreads across on-chain perpetuals.

I’m obsessed with how great things get made.

A running record of what I read, watch, and live by

writing