Technical leadership and architecture, protocol research and specification, infrastructure and key management, security and reverse engineering; backed by prototyping and embedded development, scientific computing, teaching, data digitization, and electronics repair.
The studio
F.R.E.D. is Florian Franzen’s studio in Zug, Switzerland, for technical leadership and engineering. From technical strategy, research and roadmaps to architecture decisions, hiring and integrations, it takes systems from idea to production and operates them there.
It grew out of a decade of neuroscience and academic engineering and a second career in protocol engineering, leading engineering, research and infrastructure for Substrate-, Ethereum- and Solana-based networks through to mainnet launch.
It takes on the work that sits between a sketch and a product, and stays hands-on throughout: the initial research and data analysis, the first prototype in hardware, software or both, and any infrastructure behind it that keeps it running once it has left the lab. Reproducible builds with Nix are the default, so whatever leaves the studio can be rebuilt by someone else.
Technical leadership and architecture
Technical direction from roadmap to production: architecture decisions, hiring and team building, partnerships and integrations; research, due diligence and code reviews for investors and product teams.
Protocol research and specification
Specifications that independent teams can implement, with conformance tests to prove it; consensus and cryptography reviews; tokenomics and game-theory checks before a design ships to mainnet.
Infrastructure and key management
NixOS-declared bare metal and cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD and web3 nodes; hardware-backed keys, from the key ceremony to signing policies and governance. Monitored, documented, handed over runnable and secure.
Security and reverse engineering
Hardening and incident response in operations; binary analysis with Ghidra and IDA Pro, fuzzing and protocol dissection in research; consumer hardware reverse-engineered so it can be extended.
Prototyping and embedded development
Schematic and PCB in KiCad, then the firmware and host software that make the first unit useful: ESP32, Teensy and other microcontrollers, CAN, I²C and SPI, real-time Linux, bring-up and board support.
Scientific computing and computer vision
Acquisition, analysis pipelines and machine learning on the data a lab or product actually produces: electrophysiology, spike sorting, 3D reconstruction from video, GPU-accelerated where it pays.
Teaching and workshops
Hands-on courses and workshops for engineers, researchers and students, from first principles to real systems: cryptography, economics and blockchain, CAD, 3D printing and microcontrollers. Lab material included.
Data digitization
Analog tape recovered into clean digital archives: the RF signal captured with CXADC and decoded with VHS-Decode instead of a capture card, dropouts repaired in software, every file checksummed and documented.
Electronics repair and modification
Component-level repair of lab and studio equipment; consoles and other consumer hardware recapped, modded and upgraded with modchips, HDMI and flash: the work nobody writes service manuals for.
- Languages
- Infrastructure
- Blockchain
- Frameworks
- Hardware
- Web
- Tooling
- Science
Clients
Projects
All projects →A public selection; most client work is private.
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Mind the Gap
activeTools and a NixOS live image for painless airgapping of secrets and keys: smart-card keys derived from a 24-word mnemonic, entirely offline.
Author · 2021–2026Source -
NeuroSuite
activeNeuroScope, Klusters and NDManager: desktop tools for viewing, sorting and managing electrophysiology recordings.
Major contributor · 2015–2020Source -
nixpkgs
activePackage maintenance in the Nix ecosystem: a hundred-odd pull requests since 2019, a dozen packages and a NixOS module under the studio's name.
Maintainer · 2019–2026Source -
Polkadot Protocol Specification
archivedThe implementable specification of the Polkadot host, written so that independent teams could build compatible clients from the document alone.
Lead author · 2020–2023Source -
asciidoctor-kaitai
maintainedAn Asciidoctor extension that lets a document carry its own Kaitai Struct binary format definitions, compiled and drawn as diagrams on the page.
Author · 2022–2026Source -
btrborg
maintainedBack up the latest btrbk snapshots into borg repositories: consistent, deduplicated, encrypted off-site archives of btrfs subvolumes.
Author · 2021–2026Source
Upstream contributions
All contributions →- Pull requests
- 534
- Merged
- 428
- Repositories
- 119
- Since
- 2013
Contact
Franzen Research, Engineering & Development is based in Zug, Switzerland. The studio works remote-first and comes on site where the work calls for it: kick-offs and planning sessions, workshops with the team, launches, and hardware that needs hands on it.
A short note on what you are building and where it is stuck is the best way to start.