Five years on a tech firm's core platform
Five years as a technology partner: R&D leadership, hiring, team growth, technical oversight and delivery of core infrastructure.
- Client
- Gateway.FM
The result
Five years of technical partnership with Gateway.FM, covering R&D leadership, hiring, team growth, technical oversight and core engineering delivery. Two of our experienced people worked inside its teams for most of that time, with responsibility extending well beyond writing software.
The system we helped deliver, cdk-erigon, became the sequencer on Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta on 1 October 2024. In its December 2023 client comparison, Polygon reported over 150 times faster synchronisation and a tenth of the disk space compared with zkNode. Those are Polygon's published comparison figures for that infrastructure.
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. The work needed people who could understand the node's internals and the constraints of a live network.
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. Our Technical Oversight service covers that leadership role, with engineering delivery separately scoped. The engineering below was part of the wider Gateway relationship.
From 2023 the work centred on Polygon. Max presented the design at ETHDenver in February 2024, and the cdk-erigon sequencer went live on Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta that October.
The public engineering work includes Max's Go tests for block execution, published under his revitteth account. This is one inspectable contribution within the wider team's work.
If your business depends on a system very few people understand from the inside, we'd like to hear about it.