Hi, I’m Nil Medvedev – the Senior EVM engineer at Decent Land Labs.

I grew up in Belarus and got into tech early—around age 12—helping set up and maintain a neighborhood LAN. A few of us in adjacent apartment blocks wired our homes together, shared internet, and hosted LAN parties. Like a lot of people wired like me, I would do anything if it meant I could play MMORPGs and experience the new virtual worlds that were emerging in the early 00s.

That network gave me my first real sense of how systems fit together—hardware, software, protocols, and people. We played Counter-Strike and Lineage II, but we also learned how to make stuff work, often without clear instructions. That mindset stuck.

After university, I started my career in the corporate world, working on business intelligence systems and massive Oracle databases. A lot of it was raw SQL—long, analytical queries and traditional data warehousing. It was stable, well-defined work, but I found myself restless. I wasn’t building anything I cared about. I started exploring different languages and paradigms—Erlang, Elixir, Golang—and eventually found Ruby and Rails, which drew me in for both aesthetic and practical reasons. The Ruby community had this rare blend of pragmatism and deep curiosity. It made me realize I wanted to be a generalist: someone who understands the full stack, not just a slice of it.

I worked at EPAM for two years, mostly because it was expected after graduation, but it wasn’t wasted time. There, I got my first hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure—Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and some of the early headaches of migrating enterprise systems to the cloud. After that, I moved into game development. At Vizor Games and then Strikerz, I worked on backend infrastructure for large-scale, Unreal Engine-based PC and console games. It was a jump for both the studios and myself—from mobile games to full-blown simulations. At Strikerz we were building a football sim meant to compete with FIFA, backed by Cristiano Ronaldo. I got to be involved from the architectural phase—whiteboard sketches, service planning, infrastructure PoCs, messy integrations with external systems. It was demanding, but I loved it.

I got pulled into crypto during the first big Ethereum wave in 2017–2018. Back then, the learning curve seemed steep, and I didn't have the space to dive in properly. But I kept watching. Later, I started contributing to Reth and found that my experience with systems, backend architectures, and distributed services translated surprisingly well. That was when it clicked: blockchain wasn’t a separate world. It was a compressed version of everything I’d already been working on.

Now I work at Decent Land Labs, where I maintain Load Network’s fork of Reth. It’s a high-bandwidth EVM-compatible execution layer that leverages Arweave for permanent storage, and it integrates with Dymint rollapps. My focus is on execution clients, consensus mechanisms, and the system-level design of DeFi infrastructure.

What I’ll be exploring here on the blog is an extension of that work. I’m interested in how different execution environments interact, where the edges are—how Ethereum handles boundary conditions, and what it means to optimize for them. I’ll be comparing Reth with Geth to understand how EVM design decisions shape performance and flexibility. I want to write about consensus mechanisms, MEV, and Ethereum’s “dark forest,” as well as the emerging rollup landscape—especially projects focused on ultra-low-latency L2s like Rise, Monad, and MegaETH. I’m looking at how execution environments might change if L1s simplify (as in Vitalik’s “RISC-V” vision), and what that means for developers.

I’m also researching how data from other chains or sources can settle to Arweave, what inter-protocol settlement actually looks like in practice, and how Load Network and tools like HyperBEAM could help make that process composable and reliable for DeFi applications.

Long-term, I’m trying to keep a wide-angle lens on how traditional and decentralized finance might converge, how market structure evolves across systems, and what infrastructure we need to get there.