Stebalien's Corner Of The Net

I'm Stebalien (a.k.a. Steven) and this is my little corner of the net. If you're here because I've been ignoring some PR/issue, please send me an email. If I don't respond, feel free to bug me once every few days; I won't be offended.

I work on decentralized and distributed systems by day and hack on Emacs-related projects by night. My dream is to someday build protocols out of content-addressed WebAssembly "objects".

I've been working on decentralized systems and protocols since 2015:

• It started in university (MIT) where I wrote my Master's thesis on a decentralized access control protocol. That's also where I got interested in IPFS & IPLD.
• I began working at Protocol Labs in 2017, working on Kubo (go-ipfs) and go-libp2p, eventually becoming the Kubo tech-lead and de-facto go-libp2p maintainer before joining the Filecoin project (money makes the world go round, and all that).
• In 2020, I switched teams to help launch Filecoin, eventually building the Filecoin Virtual Machine (a smart contract VM built on WebAssembly + IPLD) in 2021 and FEVM (the EVM on-top-of the FVM) in 2022.
• In 2024, I joined FilOz, a member of the Protocol Labs network, where I worked on continuing to maintain the security of and improve the Filecoin network, spending most of my time on F3.

As of May 2025, I'm taking a break from paid work to learn (I have an extensive backlog in my org-mode inbox) and polish my tools (hack on Emacs, play with LLMs, maybe set up a home lab). I expect I'll get bored in a few months, but I want to spend some time exploring in a way that just isn't possible with a full-time job.

Note: If you decide to read old posts on my blog, please check the date and keep in mind that I wrote everything before 2011 in high school, and everything before 2017 in university.