Who is Mr. Hook?

ALEX HOOK SOLUTIONS COMPANY • ALEX HOOK SOLUTIONS COMPANY •
Alex Hook

Hardcore solo software engineering since 2020

I'm Alex Hook, an 18-year-old software engineer who's simply good at his job.


I'm also a founder & lead engineer at Untron, a platform targeted at streamlining and accelerating transition from Tron to the EVM ecosystem.


Talk to me Hire me

Skills

I believe that a competent software engineer can build a solution with whatever stack of tools they're given. Nevertheless...

Languages

I've dealt with probably tens of languages and frameworks in my career. However, I've had most experience with these:

Topics

Previously an Ethereum researcher who had consumed tons of Ethresear.ch and Vitalik's articles for years instead of going to college, I'm an expert in the internals of blockchains and various Web3 protocols.

I can tell you quite a lot of how things in Ethereum (more EL than CL, honestly), Bitcoin, and a bunch of other chains work. In 2024, I had a blog on Mirror explaining various concepts in the Ethereum roadmap in relatively simple terms. I'm usually bored at Ethereum conferences. Also, I am a founder of quite a tech-centric Web3 project — Untron.

I'm curious about stablecoins & trustless finance, cryptography (mainly applied ZK proofs), economics, and whatever else helps us bring efficient financial rails to billions of people worldwide. In this paradigm, I see software engineering as a tool, rather than an end in itself.

Others

I've been doing full-stack, frontend, backend, devops, QA, security, mobile apps, Telegram bots, serverless, serverful, networking, gaming cheats (as a kid), reverse-engineering (also as a kid), and whatnot. If you need me to do something, I probably had at least some experience in this already.

I've rarely had engineers as coworkers, so I'm used to building huge things alone. That doesn't mean I cannot work in a team though.

I'm ESL. Even though I've never been to an English-speaking country, I'm arguably fluent and quite good at writing and pronunciation. This page is an example — I used zero AI while writing it, even for spellcheck.

Projects

I only list projects I'm proud of today here.

Untron V3

Untron V3 is a horizontally scalable cross-chain liquidity protocol for Tron and EVM with probably the most trust-minimized design among all cross-chain bridges.

It implements a light client for Tron in Solidity and a whole lot of other hacks to guarantee that swaps from Tron USDT to the EVM do not depend on any entities besides Tron's validators. It also has a lot of interesting and unique concepts such as permanent deposit addresses and multi-coinness, recommend reading — docs.

I've fully specced, built, and audited Untron V3's smart contracts and infrastructure solo in about three months. It's fully open-source, you can read its code here.

Untron Intents

Untron Intents is an intent-based bridge protocol that lets you execute arbitrary transactions on Tron from EVM chains, powered by Untron V3. Bridges from Untron series are arguably the most secure and trust-minimized Tron bridges out here.

It's also fully open-source, you can read its code here.

Career

Software Engineer — Daimo

Apr 2025 — Nov 2025
  • •Designed and built Daimo Universal Addresses protocol that Daimo V2 builds upon today. It was audited by Nethermind Audit with two low-severity findings.
  • •Integrated Circle Gateway, USDT0, and The Legacy Mesh to Daimo Pay, expanding its chain coverage and liquidity efficiency.
  • •Built and integrated Untron V2 into Daimo, making it the first Ethereum app with support for Tron USDT. Daimo are still using Untron and have recently switched to Untron V3 for the first-class EVM<>Tron coverage.

Founder & Lead Engineer — Untron

Aug 2024 — Today
  • •Invented and wrote a research paper for a ZK-based Tron light client bridge for the EVM (Hook, 2024). Today's Untron protocols build upon that technology.
  • •Designed and built Untron V1, V2, V3, Intents, Bridge API/UI, and 100% of the Untron project's code.
  • •Scaled Untron from zero to ~$100k in monthly volume with $0 in investments and no full-time employees. (This info might already be outdated — the project grows fast)

Researcher & Writer — 2077 Research

May 2024 — January 2025
  • •Wrote 20+ commercial and public good articles about Ethereum & EVM projects, usually published on their websites.
  • •Had the position of the "give him the most complex tasks in the company" know-it-all guy.
  • •Probably did cheapest professional research in the entire Ethereum ecosystem at that time.

Note: The company went bankrupt, and most of their websites are now down, so you will likely not manage to find most of my work there. Let me know if you will, though — I'd happily add some of those articles here.

Intern — Clave

Spring 2024
  • •Was responsible for quite a bunch of UI/UX review at Clave Wallet's early stages.
  • •Contributed to ideas on social & ZK-based recovery, yield farming, account abstraction, and interop.
  • •Ran a 10-person focus group of crypto beginners for collecting user experiences in Clave.

Acknowledgements

Hiring

I'm based in Batumi, Georgia (the country).

Thus, if you want me to build code for your project, I've realistically got three options for you:

  1. I can do semi-in-person job somewhere in Georgia;
  2. I can do remote (most common option for hiring me);
  3. You could help me relocate to the US (most delusional yet appreciated option). I normally don't consider the EU for relocation.

If any of these options sound good to you, and you like my code — feel free to DM me on Telegram or X.

If you just wanna chat, feel free to DM me too.