Alireza Babaei

We built a game launcher backed by one of the strongest anti cheat systems around at the time, along with regional low latency servers so Iranian players could play without lag. At peak that was more than 2,000 concurrent players per title, and we never charged anyone for it.

Sanctions made getting hold of these titles genuinely difficult for Iranian gamers, so we set about making the games modular enough to build an experience shaped around those players. That is what pushed us into reverse engineering, and where I learned to read a system from the inside rather than from its documentation. The habit still serves me every time I meet an unfamiliar API or an undocumented data format.

What survived that period was not only technical. It was years of good hours for a community whose access to these games was never straightforward.

Daily work on the thing many engineers learn last: that being found is an engineering problem in its own right.

It changed how I approach everything I build. URL structure, heading hierarchy and metadata now get designed at the start rather than bolted on after launch. A beautiful site nobody can find has not really been built.

Since 2021 I have been active across the Ethereum ecosystem, inside many top tier projects, sometimes as an early adopter and sometimes as an active member or community owner.

Along the way I launched my own protocol, Elora, in 2022, we built the Crypto101 education platform, I competed in several major hackathons, and I worked on fundraising for a number of private projects.

What I took from those years turned out to be less technical than I expected. I learned how user trust gets built, and how quickly it can be lost.

Until then my work was mostly getting other people's products in front of an audience. From here on I built the product itself: a market data terminal, an exchange price comparator, a clinical assistant, an interactive fiction platform, an online store and an on chain analytics dashboard.

Alongside those has been AI work for large institutions, which is private, so I cannot write about the details however much I would like to.

A full engineering and marketing team, taking enterprise projects from zero to launch: strategy, design, code, release and growth.

My own role sits mostly where those two meet: the engineering decisions that turn out to be growth decisions, and the growth decisions that turn out to be architecture.