# Manav Aggarwal

Engineering manager and tech lead for distributed systems in blockchain and payments. Early Go engineer on a rollup node, then led its 5-engineer team to production; shipped 2 mainnet protocol changes; now a PM prototyping agentic payment experiments.

- Email: manavaggarwal1234@gmail.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/Manav-Aggarwal
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/manav
- Location: New York, NY
- Web: https://manav-aggarwal.pages.dev

## Experience

### Celestia Labs — New York, NY (Remote)

**Product Manager** (Feb 2026 – Present)

- Ran discovery for agentic-commerce products through user interviews and prototypes; recommended which ideas to pursue or kill.
- Co-designed an [agent micropayments scheme on x402](https://cloudflare-payments.pages.dev/) for paid content at the CDN edge and built its prototype site. Edge servers verify each payment locally against one threshold public key with no chain round-trip; a rollup settles in batches.
- Specced a cross-chain credit product; researched agent auditability and how exchanges digitize market infrastructure.

**Product Team Lead, Interop** (May 2025 – Feb 2026)

- Owned the spec and engineering roadmap for [Lazybridging](https://blog.celestia.org/lazybridging-demo/), Celestia's cross-chain bridging protocol. **Managed 3 engineers**, hiring 2.
- Led 2 of them building a stablecoin solver for instant transfers onto [Eden](https://x.com/celestia/status/2111054730038583485), Celestia's agentic-commerce chain; paused it pre-launch after my analysis found the interop market saturated, and recommended pivoting the team to cross-chain credit.
- Authored and implemented [**CIP-45**](https://github.com/celestiaorg/CIPs/blob/main/cips/cip-045.md) in Go and **shipped it to mainnet**: single-signature token transfers routed through Celestia to a destination chain, now used by bot.fun on Eden.
- Authored and led the design of [**CIP-46**](https://github.com/celestiaorg/CIPs/blob/main/cips/cip-046.md), shipped in the same upgrade: on-chain ZK verification of cross-chain messages, an alternative to multisig trust.

**Product Team Lead (Engineering Manager & Tech Lead), Evolve (formerly Rollkit)** (Nov 2023 – May 2025)

- **Managed 5 engineers** (hiring, 1:1s, performance reviews, promotions), reporting to the Head of Engineering. As tech lead and release owner, set the engineering roadmap for the [Evolve stack](https://ev.xyz), a Go framework for launching custom blockchains.
- Deprioritized fraud proofs to ship production full nodes first, then added EVM support so EVM chains could launch on the stack.
- Drove adoption by [VeVe's Disney-licensed Collect chain](https://www.veve.me/en) and [XO Markets](https://xo.markets); Eden later launched on the stack.
- Ran the handover of Evolve's code, maintainership and users to Binary Builders, keeping Celestia a neutral data layer.

**Protocol Engineer, Rollkit** (Mar 2022 – Nov 2023)

- Joined Rollkit, a rollup framework, as its third engineer; built the core of its node in Go: sequencer, block sync and exchange, execution interface, and data-availability integration.
- Designed P2P sync so full nodes follow the chain with low-latency soft confirmations before data-availability finality.
- Wrote the [spec (ADR-009, proposed)](https://github.com/evstack/ev-node/blob/main/docs/adr/adr-009-state-fraud-proofs.md) and [merged prototype](https://github.com/evstack/ev-node/pull/567) for non-interactive state fraud proofs, based on an [academic paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.09044).

### Two Sigma Investments, LP — New York, NY

**Software Engineer, Time-Series Storage, Platform Engineering** (Aug 2021 – Mar 2022)

- Built time-series storage infrastructure in Java that quantitative engineers used to backtest trading algorithms.

**Software Engineer Intern, AlphaStudio, Modeling Engineering** (Summer 2020)

- Built a distributed function-as-a-service platform (Kubernetes, Java, PostgreSQL); led requirements and wrote the design doc.

### Meta — Seattle, WA

**Software Engineer Intern, Probabilistic Programming** (Summer 2019)

- Built parallelized MCMC and variational inference over data subsets in HackPPL, a probabilistic programming framework.

## Education

### Stanford University (Jun 2021)

B.S. & M.S. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence and Systems Track). GPA 3.8.

CS 107 Teaching Assistant, CS 106 Section Leader, ACM ICPC Regionals Team

## Skills

Go (Golang), Python, C/C++, Java, JavaScript, SQL; Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform; distributed systems, P2P networking

_Last updated 2026-11-03. Also available as [JSON](https://manav-aggarwal.pages.dev/resume.json)._