Tiago Silva

Senior Smart Contract Engineer | DeFi & Protocol Infrastructure

About

Senior Solidity engineer with 4+ years of production smart contract experience across DeFi vaults, on-chain derivatives and protocol-level RWA infrastructure. Core protocol engineer at Story/Data Foundation (6M+ IPs registered) — led a cross-functional product vertical team, drove multiple external audit rounds, and ran governance operations end-to-end. Built an onchain options OTC desk (10M+ USD notional) and RWA-backed ERC-4626 vaults at Ribbon Finance; most recently hardened the L1 custody layer of Derive's derivatives exchange. Combines smart contract expertise with institutional finance/private equity background (Oxy Capital, 1B AUM) and founder experience.

Skills

Solidity Smart Contracts DeFiERC-4626LayerZeroGovernanceSecurity Audits

Experience

Senior Solidity Smart Contract Engineer at Derive (formerly Lyra)
Aug 2026 — Present
contract
Crypto Options and Futures Protocol.
- Wrote and hardened the withdrawal and fund-custody path across the protocol's core Solidity contracts.
- Built the contract test suite covering the custody and settlement surface: fuzzing and invariant testing.
- Responsible for deploying LayerZero cross-chain bridging for the required collateral assets.
Senior Solidity Smart Contract Engineer at Story / Data Foundation (rebranded)
Jan 2024 — Mar 2026
RWA Infrastructure for the Intellectual Property Asset Class.
- Architect/core protocol engineer across licensing, royalty and dispute modules over multiple audit rounds. Protocol has 6M+ IPs registered.
- Led a cross-functional product vertical team (frontend, SDK, design, dev-rel) as protocol engineer — drove delivery from contract architecture through SDK/frontend integration to launch, while authoring the underlying solidity smart contracts.
- Led governance operations end-to-end: designed the governance process/setup, drove proposals from specification through Safe multisig execution for protocol upgrades and key parameter changes.
- Led web3 internal security practice: smart contract monitoring, key smart contract reviews and ecosystem projects hardening.
Solidity Smart Contract Engineer at Ribbon Finance / Aevo (rebranded)
Apr 2022 — Dec 2023
DeFi - Decentralized Options Vaults, Options OTC Desk and Options/Perps on-chain Exchange.
- Fully built out the smart contracts for an on-chain options OTC desk with 10M+ USD notional volume traded.
- Responsible for the V2 yield-source migration of Ribbon Earn — a principal-protected structured product, 7M USD TVL — moving yield generation from lending into tokenized treasuries.
- Designed and built an async ERC-4626 vault - USDC-denominated where a manager defines asset allocation ratios with sync-deposit/async-withdrawal that supports RWA non-atomic swaps.
Smart Contract Engineer at Independent Projects
Jan 2022 — Dec 2022
- Built and shipped NFT licensing/renting protocol for a client involving staking and reward distribution.
- Chainlink Hackathon prize winner with Mothora (GameFi, UE5) involving staking, vaults, oracles and NFT items.
Investment Team at Oxy Capital
Sep 2020 — Feb 2022
Private Equity Fund - 1 Billion AUM.
- Worked 2 deals end-to-end: Sourcing, Due Diligence, Negotiation and Closing.
- Responsible for monitoring several portfolio companies across multiple sectors.
Founder and CEO at Lumer
Sep 2018 — Sep 2020
Lumer helps smokers reach their goals through a Smart Lighter and App.
- Raised seed round for the Company to fully develop the product MVP across 3 components: Hardware, Mobile App and a Big Data Corporate Dashboard.

About

Skills

Experience

Education