Join us in building the decentralized web.

Great ideas don’t grow on trees, but exceptional talent combined with our experience helps identify market gaps and opportunities. We are looking for ambitious pre-founders to join Equilibrium as Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR).

Reach out to Hannes if you’d like to learn more.

Who Are You?

As an EIR at Equilibrium, we support you in finding the right problem to solve and help develop an idea into a fully-fledged product. But who are you?

  • Someone tinkering with ideas after work or maybe already working on an idea full-time
  • Self-motivated, gritty, and not afraid to get your hands dirty
  • Technical enough to hack together an initial prototype
  • Bias towards action and urgency to get things done

How Can We Help You?

With 60+ senior protocol engineers across all Equilibrium Group companies (Labs, Eiger, and Ventures) and 6+ years of experience building in the space, we have worked with most tech stacks across a wide range of ecosystems.

This, combined with our first-hand experience incubating and scaling multiple startups in the blockchain space (such as zkCloud and Membrane Finance), gives us a unique perspective on open problems in the space and the ability to support you with various challenges.

Our core value-add is on the technical side, as well as our understanding of the broader blockchain infra-space. With experts in cryptography, distributed systems design, and high-performance engineering, we can**:**

  • Help you think through the problem space and existing implementations
  • Provide thoughtful and objective feedback on different design choices
  • Support implementation and help you set strong foundations from the start

Other areas of support include:

  • Weekly feedback sessions (both engineering and product/go-to-market)
  • Support with recruiting and building an engineering team
  • Help with corporate setup and all operations-related things to running a startup
  • Fundraising support and introductions to our network of investors

Program Structure

You can think of our EIR program as a pre-seed investment with significant tangible value-add to help you succeed.

Contrary to many other EIR programs, we don’t expect you to commit any time to internal projects or work with our portfolio companies. Instead, we want you to focus full-time on exploring and prototyping ideas. We are also not running a cohort-based EIR program, which means we can dedicate more time and resources to help you succeed.

  • Duration: 6 months
  • Timing: Ongoing (no specific start date)
  • Compensation: Salary + operational costs
  • Location: Remote (but our Helsinki office is open if you want to work from there)

Interesting Areas To Work On

While you’ll have complete freedom to explore any topic, some areas that we’ve thought about recently include:

  • Crypto x AI: As AI becomes more widely adopted and integrated into our lives, the risks of closed-source and centrally controlled models magnify. We believe there are still interesting opportunities in decentralized training and inference, as well as governance and monetization of open-source models. In addition, the rapid improvement of generative AI increases the urgency of creating tools for verifying content authenticity.
  • Privacy: While programmable privacy infrastructure is evolving, many problems remain. Simultaneously, as the infrastructure improves, new use cases and applications become feasible, enabling us to escape the Fermi paradox.
  • DeFi: As the industry moves from speculation to utility, new opportunities open up. We’ve previously explored areas such as under-collateralized lending and borrowing against a broader range of assets, payment infrastructure, and asset tokenization, but we’re interested in any ideas that help advance the adoption of Internet Finance.
  • Leveraging ZKP Outside of Blockchains: While ZKPs found their first major PMF within blockchains (privacy and scaling), we believe the potential of ZKPs is much larger. This belief led us to incubate zkCloud, which provides on-demand compute for any prover and proof system. With all parts of the proving infrastructure rapidly improving, the time is right to explore applications and real-world use cases leveraging ZKPs.
  • Innovative Base Layer Designs: Despite 10+ years of development, we still believe that no base layer (in its current form) can provide sufficient capabilities regarding scaling, programmability, privacy, UX, and security.

If any of these resonate with you or if you have another idea that excites you, we’d love to hear from you.

About Us

Since 2018, Equilibrium has been building core infrastructure for blockchains and distributed systems. With partners such as Aleo, Celestia, Starknet, zkSync, and others, we’ve tackled challenges related to scaling, privacy, and security.

We also have first-hand experience incubating and scaling ventures in the space, including Labs and Eiger (engineering consultancy), zkCloud (a generalized proving network), and Membrane Finance (issuer of the first MiCA-regulated Euro-stablecoin, acquired by Paxos in 2024).