Consulting

Blockchain interoperability & agentic engineering — from research to production

I help teams design, secure, and ship systems where blockchains and AI agents have to talk to each other — safely. My work bridges a decade of academic research (INESC-ID, Técnico Lisboa, MIT) with hands-on industry engineering (Quant Overledger, Linux Foundation / Hyperledger, Blockdaemon).

Email me See selected work
Ph.D. Técnico Lisboa · Summa Cum Laude Best INESC-ID Ph.D. Thesis Fulbright → MIT IETF SATP core draft author Hyperledger Cacti maintainer

My research spans 30+ publications with 2,300+ citations (h-index 18, i10-index 23), and 15+ MSc students mentored.

Five ways we can work together

Every engagement is grounded in academic and industry experience.

  • Cross-chain architecture and strategy: bridges, oracles, gateways, and when not to interoperate.
  • Gateway-based design following the IETF Secure Asset Transfer (SAT) architecture and protocol work.
  • Hands-on with Hyperledger Cacti and the SATP Hermes engine.
  • Vendor and solution evaluation for digital-asset and payment platforms.
  • Stablecoin, DeFi, and integration with Fintech platforms.

Good fit if You are connecting ledgers (or a ledger to existing enterprise systems) and DeFi products to financial infrastructure and need an architecture that survives contact with auditors, regulators, and attackers.

  • Agent system design: orchestration, capability design, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and its connection to distributed system technologies.
  • Secure communication and coordination between agents, and between agents and blockchains.
  • Agent-oriented tooling; example of work doene is the SATP Hermes SDK, CLI, and (wip) MCP server.

Good fit if You are moving an AI-agent prototype toward production and need real engineering: evaluation, security boundaries, and interoperability between agents and other systems.

  • Author of the IETF SATP core draft and main author of the DLT Gateway Crash Recovery draft.
  • Spec design, security considerations, and standardization strategy for novel protocols.
  • First-hand experience with the systematic review process: having co-chaired workshops and served as a reviewer for reputable international conferences and journals.

Good fit if Your product depends on a protocol that needs to interoperate widely — and you want it designed for standardization and rigour from day one.

  • Threat modeling and security review of cross-chain and digital-asset systems.
  • Information system risk assessment (engineering, threat model).
  • Technical due diligence for investors and acquirers, backed by industry tenure at Blockdaemon, and the Linux Foundation.

Good fit if You are about to deploy (or invest in) cross-chain infrastructure and need an independent, research-grade opinion.

  • “Blockchain Interoperability: Theory and Practice” — tutorial delivered at IEEE ICBC 2025, adaptable to your team.
  • Talks and workshops at Hyperledger Global Forum (Dublin 2022, 2021) and the “Blockchain Interoperability with Hyperledger Cacti” workshop.
  • Guest lectures at universities worldwide and panels such as INATBA’s Interoperability Panel (2024).
  • Mentorship track record: 6 Hyperledger mentorship programs guided, 15+ MSc students supervised, and the Hyperledger “Enterprise Blockchain Technologies” university course.

Good fit if Your engineering team or leadership needs to get fluent in interoperability or AI agents (from a security/interoperability perspectivev).

Selected work

A sample of research, open source, and industry work you can check independently.

Open Source
SATP Hermes & Hyperledger Cacti

Maintainer of Hyperledger Cacti, the Linux Foundation’s enterprise blockchain interoperability project. The SATP Hermes engine — a cross-chain asset transfer engine built on the IETF SATP draft — shipped in Cacti v3.0.0 (August 2026).

github.com/hyperledger-cacti/cacti →
Standardization
IETF — Secure Asset Transfer (SATP)

Author of the SATP core Internet-Draft and main author of the DLT Gateway Crash Recovery mechanism draft, defining crash fault-tolerant gateways for secure, reliable asset transfers between ledgers.

IETF SATP working group →
Peer-reviewed research
Security & privacy of interoperability

“SoK: Security and Privacy of Blockchain Interoperability” (IEEE S&P 2024); “A Brief History of Blockchain Interoperability” — cover article, Communications of the ACM (October 2024); most-read paper in ACM DLT in 2023.

Google Scholar profile →
Research → Product
Harmonia & DendrETH

Framework for cross-chain applications secured by zero-knowledge proofs, built with Blockdaemon and Metacraft Labs. DendrETH implements a hardened Ethereum light client as a smart contract, fixing known critical security flaws.

Project page →
Bridge monitoring
XChainWatcher & Hephaestus

Cross-chain monitoring research: XChainWatcher identifies anomalies in cross-chain bridges (ACM/IFIP Middleware 2025); related work appeared at IEEE DSN 2025. Hephaestus generates cross-chain process models to detect malicious behavior.

arXiv:2410.02029 →
Industry & Government
From the Portuguese Justice system to Blockchain

Engineering roles at Quant Overledger, Blockdaemon, and the Linux Foundation (Hyperledger). Raised €1.2M from the European Commission to productize interoperability research (principal engineer, team of 5). Earlier: JusticeChain, a blockchain solution for the Portuguese Ministry of Justice taken close to production.

Full CV →

A decade between research and practice

Career milestones and selected publications — every entry links to the source.

  • 2018 – 2021 Invited Assistant Professor, Técnico Lisboa
    Lectured 4 subjects across 3 years — including Software Engineering and Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (the roots of today’s agentic engineering practice).
  • 2018 – 2020 JusticeChain — blockchain for the Portuguese Ministry of Justice
    Designed and built blockchain-based protection for justice data with the Portuguese government; yielded an MSc thesis, two papers, and a production-ready proof of concept.
  • 2020 Hyperledger Cactus & the IETF
    Early contributor to Hyperledger Cactus (March 2020, co-author of its whitepaper); joined the IETF in October 2020, where the ODAP/SATP draft line began.
  • 2021 Foundational interoperability papers
    Published “A Survey on Blockchain Interoperability: Past, Present, and Future Trends” in ACM Computing Surveys — the field’s reference map, classifying 67 solutions and introducing the Blockchain Interoperability Framework. The same year, Hermes and ODAP-2PC (IEEE SCC 2021, journal version in Future Generation Computer Systems) laid the groundwork for what became IETF SATP and the SATP Hermes engine.
  • 2022 – 2023 Fulbright — MIT Connection Science & MIT Media Lab
    Visiting researcher studying security and privacy of interoperability, advised by Dr. Thomas Hardjono and Prof. Alex Pentland.
  • 2023 Harmonia: zero-knowledge cross-chain security
    Proposed Harmonia and DendrETH with Blockdaemon and Metacraft Labs — trust-minimized cross-chain applications via ZK light clients.
  • 2024 Ph.D. with distinction · CACM cover · Best INESC-ID Ph.D. student
    Defended “Distributed Ledger Interoperability Security” (Summa Cum Laude, September 2024). “A Brief History of Blockchain Interoperability” featured on the cover of Communications of the ACM (October 2024); SoK paper published at IEEE S&P.
  • 2025 From theory to real deployments
    “Blockchain Interoperability: Theory and Practice” tutorial at IEEE ICBC 2025; bridge-anomaly papers at IEEE DSN 2025 and ACM/IFIP Middleware 2025 (XChainWatcher), Harmonia and Cacti deployments.
  • 2026 SATP Hermes ships — with tooling for AI agents
    Hyperledger Cacti v3.0.0 (August 2026) ships the SATP Hermes re-designed cross-chain asset transfer engine; work in progrerss on a new CLI, and MCP server aimed at AI agents doing cross-chain work.
Selected publications & talks

Process

1 Intro call

A short call to understand your problem and see if I can help.

2 Scoping

A short written proposal including goals, deliverables, timeline.

3 Engagement

Advisory sprint, architecture review, workshop, or retainer — whatever fits.

4 Delivery & handoff

Documents, code, and a working session.

Let’s talk about your interoperability or agent problem

Email me with a bit of context — happy to set up a call from there.

rafael.belchior@tecnico.ulisboa.pt

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