0xZKnw portfolio / 2026
AI & blockchain engineering — undergrad, 2026 Montpellier, FR · 43.61°N 3.88°E

From smart contracts to small language models.

Four years building on-chain — DeFi, escrow, hackathons — now training, quantizing and shipping AI that runs on real hardware. I trained my own 58M-parameter French reasoning LLM from scratch on a gaming GPU.

open to internships & apprenticeships 2021 → 2026 blockchain → ai scroll
01

Trajectory

focus over time · 2021—2026

Blockchain was passion #1 from 2021 to 2025 — DeFi, smart contracts, hackathons. Then the projects started changing shape: agents, local inference, and eventually training a language model from scratch.

The curve tells it better than I can.

fig. 01 · focus over timeself-reported
blockchain ai / ml
2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 first lines of web3 Etherwave Labs internship RealFi hackathon — 1st place ClawRS — local AI, Rust Holonym internship frlm — my own LLM
  1. 2021 first lines of web3
  2. 2025 Etherwave Labs internship
  3. 2025 RealFi hackathon — 1st place
  4. 2026 ClawRS — local AI, Rust
  5. 2026 Holonym internship
  6. 2026 frlm — my own LLM
not to scale — honest in shape
02

Selected work

four projects · all public code
01

frlm

2026 — python · pytorch
llm trained from scratch

A 58M-parameter French reasoning LLM trained entirely from scratch — on a gaming laptop's RTX 4060. It works through problems in a <think> scratchpad before answering, and beats public French GPT-2s twice its size on language quality and arithmetic. Qwen-style architecture, Muon optimizer, custom digit-split BPE tokenizer, full pretrain → midtrain → SFT → GRPO/RLAIF pipeline.

PyTorchMuonGRPORLAIFBPE tokenizer
view source
fig. 02 · frlm — live sample
val losstokens seen →
parameters58M
vram budget8 GB
total gpu time~8 h
02

ClawRS

2026 — rust · ★ 5
local-first desktop app

A native desktop app to run LLMs entirely on your own machine — no cloud, no API keys, no data leaving the device. Inference through llama.cpp with CUDA, Vulkan and Metal backends, an agentic system with 30+ tools (files, shell, git, web search), MCP support, granular permissions and a bilingual FR/EN interface.

llama.cppGGUFCUDA / Vulkan / MetalMCPagentic tools
view source
fig. 03 · ClawRS — private by constructiondesktop
you › summarize this repo and commit the changes
qwen3-8b.gguf cuda · 42 tok/s 0 bytes left your machine
built-in tools30+
local & private100%
gpu backends3
03

locked

2026 — rust · svelte
agent security harness

An agent harness with one door, and a receipt for everything that goes through it. Most harnesses ask the model not to leak your credentials — locked removes the ability. Every third-party call leaves through TAP, the sandbox has no network interface at all, and the compiler enforces that the tool executor can't even open a socket. Prompt injection can fully persuade the model — and still find no tool to comply with.

TauriTAPsandboxingegress isolation
view source
fig. 04 · locked — one door outegress model
agent tools · sandbox TAP holds keys internet APIs · services no socket · no DNS
ok  locked-tools has no path to an HTTP stack
ok  container runs --network none
ok  reqwest reachable only from locked-egress
ok  egress invariant holds.
doors out1
secrets in the loop0
locks: compiler · kernel · types3
04

EventChain

1st place · $5,000
2025 — typescript · solidity

Built with the Etherwave Labs team for Funding the Commons' RealFi hackathon — and it won first place ($5,000) in the human.tech track. An event platform that kills the no-show problem: attendees lock a USDC deposit in a trustless escrow contract, check in by QR code on event day, and the contract automatically redistributes absent participants' deposits to those who showed up.

Next.jsSolidity ^0.8.30ethers.jsUSDCHuman Wallet
view source
fig. 05 · escrow.sol — USDC flowsepolia
attendees no-shows escrow USDC locked deposit + bonus + bonus organizer
of the track1st
cash prize$5,000
trust required — it's escrow0
03

Experience

internships · shipped with teams
2026
Holonym Foundation
engineering intern — human.tech
  • Worked on TAP — the Tool Authorization Protocol that lets AI agents call third-party APIs without ever holding the secrets
  • Contributed to Shield and AEX across the human.tech stack
  • Shipped at the exact intersection I care about: agent infrastructure × cryptographic trust
2025
Etherwave Labs
engineering intern — DeFi × AI
  • Built a trading bot for the AI agent playground — an ElizaOS agent reading news sentiment + MACD/RSI and placing orders on Hyperliquid
  • Developed an auto-rebalancing bot for Orca liquidity positions on Solana (work in progress)
  • Won the RealFi hackathon with the team — 1st place, human.tech track
04

Currently

what i'm digging into
a

Local & frontier AI

Following both ends of the spectrum — what frontier labs ship, and how much of it can be made to run on an 8 GB gaming GPU.

b

Quantization

GGUF, precision trade-offs, and how far a model can be compressed before it stops being itself.

c

Fine-tuning & abliteration

Post-training experiments — SFT, GRPO, RLAIF on frlm — plus "heretic" decensoring runs on open-weight models, published on Hugging Face.

d

Agent infrastructure

Harnesses, tool systems and the security model around them — what locked and TAP taught me about giving models hands safely.

huggingface.co — latest releaseopen weights ↗
0xzknw/Granite-4.2-3B-Heretic-NX-PRIME-GGUF

A capability-preserving residual-stream edit of IBM Granite 4.2 3B, released as BF16, Q8_0 and Q4_K_M GGUF builds for LM Studio and llama.cpp.

text-generation reasoning gguf abliterated lm-studio
05

Contact

montpellier · remote-friendly

Let's talk.

Building at the intersection of AI and trust? I'm a CS student in Montpellier heading for AI and/or blockchain engineering — open to internships, apprenticeships and genuinely interesting problems.