Senior DeFi Developer · Injective Labs

Markus Waas

Building the financial core of a decentralized exchange — spot & derivatives, cross-margining, protocol security.

01

About

I build the financial core of a decentralized exchange at Injective — six years of spot and derivatives logic in the Cosmos SDK exchange module, most recently its cross-margining system, alongside CosmWasm contracts and Solidity bridges. I write about smart contract development at soliditydeveloper.com, and I've followed blockchain since 2010.

Auckland, New Zealand · mail@markuswaas.com

Portrait of Markus Waas
Years writing software
0+
Years building Injective
0
MSc final grade, CS
0.0
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Experience

  1. Senior DeFi Developer

    Injective Labs

    — Present

    • Own the financial core of the exchange protocol — the Cosmos SDK exchange module's spot and derivatives logic, written in Go.
    • Helped design and build the protocol's new cross-margining system.
    • Drive security across the module: audits, fixes, and continuous hardening of the exchange logic.
    • Earlier work includes Solidity bridge contracts integrated with The Graph, and CosmWasm contracts.
  2. Smart Contract Solidity Developer

    Laminar (Acala)

    Designed and built a leveraged margin trading platform on Ethereum — multiple markets, margin calls, and liquidations — with The Graph integration so the frontend could query state efficiently.

  3. Blockchain Engineer

    Juri

    Implemented a novel staking pool and researched the platform's blockchain integration — most notably, designed a fully decentralized oracle system.

  4. Blockchain Engineer & Full-stack Developer

    Starbase

    On a small Scrum team building a token-based crowdfunding platform: introduced a staking and ranking smart contract for ERC-20 tokens, implemented a secure funds splitter, and improved the token sale contracts.

  5. Frontend Developer

    Infopark

    Built frontend features for a JavaScript CMS in a Scrum team — new value-type editors and an improved React integration that made the CMS more convenient for developers.

  6. Engineering Intern

    Crypto Software Chryselius

    Java and C++ development of a chipcard-based bootloader and file-container encryption on Ubuntu; set up the development environment and administered the backup and build servers.

03

Writing

I run soliditydeveloper.com — practical deep dives on smart contract development, from EVM internals to protocol integrations.

How to integrate Wormhole in your smart contracts

Cross-chain messaging across Ethereum, Cosmos, Injective, and beyond.

How Ethereum scales with Arbitrum Nitro

A blockchain-on-a-blockchain deep dive, and how to use it.

The Ultimate Merkle Tree Guide in Solidity

Everything you need to know about Merkle trees and where they're heading.

Writing ERC-20 Tests in Solidity with Foundry

Blazing-fast tests with no BigNumber.js in sight — only Solidity.

04

Education

Humboldt University of Berlin

MSc in Computer Science · Final grade 1.2 (German scale; ≈ 3.9/4.0 GPA)

2011 — 2018

Ottonagel-Gymnasium

Allgemeine Hochschulreife (Abitur)

2003 — 2010

05

Skills

Protocol & chain
GoCosmos SDKCosmWasmRust
Smart contracts
SolidityEVMAudits & hardening
Web
JavaScript / TypeScriptReact
Languages
German (native)English (native proficiency)Spanish (elementary)
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Interests

Away from the keyboard I train — powerlifting and calisthenics — and play padel and tennis, outdoors whenever the summer allows. Beyond sport I go deep on biohacking, longevity research, and Stoic philosophy.

I've been following blockchain since the beginning — the Bitcoin genesis block, naturally. All right, since about 2010: an active community member trying to understand every new idea down to the technical level.

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Contact

Building something in DeFi, or want to talk protocol engineering?

mail@markuswaas.com