Joseph Caughey
BLOCK CHAIN
Settlement, rights and provenance. Systems built to be verified rather than trusted.
The interesting problem was never the token. It was proving that something happened to someone who was not there and has no reason to trust you. That is the same problem I solve when an agent writes code, and it is the problem underneath every payment a machine makes on its own.
What I build
Rails, rights and receipts
Smart contracts for rights and royalties, provenance registries that survive the platform they were written on, and the analytics and risk tooling that sits around anything moving value. I came to this from running a record label, where who owns what and who gets paid are not abstract questions.
Work With MeRights · Royalties · Attribution
Ownership you can prove
I built the rights infrastructure for a record label and for Trickfilm Entertainment, the animation studio where I was CTO before it closed. Who owns a work, who gets paid when it earns, and how you prove either of those things a decade later.
Fractional Rights
Royalty contracts on ERC-1155 and ERC-721 that let several parties share ownership of a work and the revenue it earns.
Automated Splits
Payout logic written into the contract, so a split is executed rather than invoiced, reconciled and argued about later.
Licensing Registries
On-chain music licensing with provable attribution for rightsholders, built so a licence can be checked without asking me.
Provenance
Permanent, verifiable history for a creative work, that outlives the studio, the label or the platform it was registered on.
AI Attribution
Registries that record what a model was given and what it produced, so generated work carries its origin instead of shedding it.
Storage & Indexing
IPFS for the media and contract indexing for the record, so the asset and its history stay retrievable together.
Common Mine · StableMedia
Quantitative systems
Common Mine combined algorithmic execution, predictive modelling and on-chain analytics. The engineering problem is the same in any system that moves money: get accurate state, act inside defined risk, and be able to say afterwards exactly what happened and why.
Algorithmic Execution
Trading systems built on live DEX data and reinforcement learning, deployed across multiple chains.
Cross-Venue Arbitrage
Systems that price the same asset across venues and act on the spread, which is mostly a latency and state problem.
Stablecoin Design
StableMedia, a stablecoin collateralised against verified ad spend, connecting marketing budgets to on-chain liquidity.
Risk Management
Position limits, exposure rules and automated unwinds, because the failure modes are what determine whether a system survives.
Analytics & Dashboards
Real-time trade analysis and on-chain analytics, so a live position can be inspected rather than guessed at.
Predictive Modelling
Machine learning over on-chain data for liquidity analysis, forecasting and automated position management.
Where this goes
Machines that can pay
Agents now buy API calls, data and compute thousands of times a session, and a card form is not a workable answer. The x402 standard gives that a protocol and stablecoins give it settlement. The hard part was never the payment. It is the same problem as letting an agent write code: bounded scope, a policy gate before anything commits, and a record you can audit afterwards.
That is precisely what DirectiveAI does for a Git branch, and it is where the two halves of my work meet. This is the direction I am building toward rather than a shipped product.
x402 Settlement
The HTTP status code nobody used, turned into a payment handshake. An agent hits a paywalled endpoint and settles in stablecoin without a human in the loop.
Agent Wallets
Embedded and delegated wallets scoped to one agent and one job, rather than handing a model the keys to an account.
Spending Guardrails
Per-task and per-period ceilings enforced before a transaction is signed, which is a policy gate in exactly the sense DirectiveAI means it.
Auditable Trails
Every machine-initiated payment tied back to the directive that caused it, so spend can be explained after the fact.
Machine Identity
Knowing which agent acted, under whose authority, and whether it was still inside its mandate when it did.
Account Abstraction
ERC-4337 accounts with programmable rules, session keys and sponsored gas, which is what makes any of this usable.
Tools & Protocols
The Stack
Arranged by where each thing does its work: writing the contract, connecting an app to it, moving value, and keeping the record.
-
Write
The contract itself, and the standards it has to honour.
- Solidity
- Foundry
- Hardhat
- OpenZeppelin
- ERC-721
- ERC-1155
- ERC-4337
-
Connect
Getting an application and a wallet to talk to it.
- viem
- wagmi
- Ethers.js
- The Graph
- Alchemy
- WalletConnect
-
Settle
Moving value, and pricing it against the outside world.
- USDC
- Stablecoin rails
- x402
- Uniswap
- Chainlink
-
Persist
The part that has to still be there in ten years.
- IPFS
- Content addressing
- Contract indexing
Networks
Projects & Platforms
Built & Deployed
SongLicensing Protocol
On-chain licensing registry with automated royalty splits and provable attribution for rightsholders.
Album Boutique
Release platform pairing records with unlockable media, direct fan ownership and tokenised ticketing.
Trickfilm Entertainment
Rights and royalty infrastructure for animation and film, built while I was CTO. The studio has since closed.
Common Mine
Algorithmic execution framework combining reinforcement learning, cross-venue arbitrage and on-chain analytics.
StableMedia
Stablecoin collateralised against verified ad spend, bridging marketing budgets and on-chain liquidity.