Nearly five years on a tech firm's core platform

The result

We worked as a technology partner to Gateway.FM for nearly five years, from October 2021 to July 2026. The relationship grew to include R&D leadership, hiring, growing the team, oversight of highly technical work and the engineering to deliver it. Two of our experienced people worked inside its teams for most of that time. We moved on in July 2026 to focus on Revitt's own growing client base.

The system we helped deliver became the live engine of Polygon's network in September 2024. Polygon reports it syncs over 150 times faster than what it replaced and uses a tenth of the disk space. Other networks, including OKX's X Layer, have since adopted it.

The problem

Gateway.FM sells blockchain infrastructure to other businesses. In 2021 it needed experienced people who could take on its live systems straight away, without months of recruiting.

Then came a bigger job. Its partner Polygon needed new core software for one of its networks: faster, cheaper to run, and able to take over from the existing system. Very few teams anywhere had done this kind of work.

What we did

We started with a short, fixed piece of work and moved to a monthly retainer. Our team joined Gateway's infrastructure and research teams, sat in their planning sessions, presented at their company demos, and delivered reporting and dashboards for Gateway's corporate customers. Max Revitt led the engagement throughout and served as Gateway's Head of R&D from January 2025 to June 2026. Scott Fairclough joined in 2022.

Our role involved helping decide what needed doing, supporting hiring and team growth, leading the technical work and staying accountable for delivery. The engineering below was part of that wider relationship.

From 2023 the work centred on Polygon, where we delivered core infrastructure. For the technical reader:

• The first job was a StarkEx proxy, including removing a Redis dependency from it.
• With Polygon, Gateway turned Erigon, the Ethereum execution client its CTO co-founded, into cdk-erigon: an RPC node and sequencer for Polygon's Type-2 zkEVM.
• Max authored 261 pull requests into the public 0xPolygon/cdk-erigon repository, 219 of them merged. Scott authored 353. Both are merged contributors to upstream Erigon (erigontech/erigon).
• The work covered the sequencer, state-root and interhashing correctness, unwind and recovery paths, blob data-availability recovery, EIP-2935, RPC endpoints, performance statistics, CI and dependency CVE patching.
• Polygon's Eggfruit upgrade made cdk-erigon the live sequencer on Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta in September 2024. Polygon credited "Gateway, the team behind the widely used Ethereum Erigon client".
• Max presented the design at ETHDenver in February 2024: Building an Erigon-Based Node for a Type-2 zkEVM.

If your business depends on a system very few people understand from the inside, we'd like to hear about it.