Specialism declared. Doctrine stated. Out-of-scope explicit
Intrepid Development is a founder-led Australian studio. The specialism is Solidity — audit-ready smart contracts on Ethereum and PulseChain. Full-stack software, websites, and AI infrastructure are taken when they fit; declined with a referral when they don't.
On-chain finance is the highest-leverage software anyone is shipping right now. One contract, one bug, can move (or lose) eight figures in a block. Most studios that touch this domain treat it as another front-end vertical. It isn't.
Intrepid exists because Solidity work is different from web work and demands a firm built around it — not bolted onto a generalist agency. The studio's job is to ship contracts that can survive an audit, an exploit attempt, and a year of production traffic, and to engage on terms that make that work possible.
If on-chain code is the highest-leverage software anyone is shipping, then engaging a generalist agency for it is a category error.
Every other choice on this page — paid diagnostics, fixed fees, three-option proposals, a published audit-readiness checklist, two open-source packages distilled from production — follows from accepting that.
Bitcoin clicked in 2010 — early enough to watch every cycle, every reorg, every protocol-design idea get litigated in real markets.
Ethereum shipped in 2015. Solidity came with it — a language we'd call competent rather than beautiful, wrapped around the highest-leverage software platform of the decade. Watching Uniswap get invented, AMMs assemble themselves, DeFi compose into a working financial substrate — that's what made the choice to specialise here obvious.
The language matters less than what it underwrites: open, auditable, on-chain finance that nobody can switch off. The studio incorporated as Intrepid Development Pty Ltd in 2021 and narrowed to Solidity as the primary practice once PulseChain shipped and it became clear there was room for a firm that took both chains seriously.
// THE WALL · The narrowing wasn't a single moment — it was watching the same industry-level wall hit over and over. Generalist studios shipping unaudited contracts. Audit firms charging six figures for findings that a Foundry invariant test and a NatSpec pass would have caught for free. Founders deploying because the calendar said launch, not because the threat model said ready. Specialising isn't a marketing position; it's the only honest response to that wall.
Not table stakes. Things we operate by that aren't obvious — and that anyone considering an engagement should know up front.
Auditors don't write your tests, your invariants, or your threat model — and they shouldn't. The diagnostic that comes before any engagement is the same checklist a senior auditor runs through silently in the first hour of a kickoff. We tell you what's missing before the audit firm does, when it costs you a week instead of a finding.
On-chain finance composes. A bug in a routing contract becomes a bug in every protocol that integrates it. We treat every contract we ship as an upstream — fully tested, formally specified where it matters, and shipped with the deployment scripts you actually want, not the ones the framework gives you for free.
The Elm Web3 packages we publish (intrepidshape/elm-web3 and intrepidshape/elm-web3-ui) are distilled from production. The Pre-Audit Hardening Pack is the checklist we run on our own work. We work in the open because the only way to prove engineering taste is to publish it. Anyone can claim. Code can't.
// Anyone can claim. Code can't.
Bespoke Solidity systems and TypeScript bots running in production across Ethereum and PulseChain. Trading, liquidity management, position management. Hardened, full Foundry coverage, deployment-script complete.
Code reviewed by an independent third-party auditor.
Zero bugs reported.
Live · ongoing retainer · full source available to the client.
// Auditor named on request. Engagement details confidential under a Mutual NDA — both parties bound, neither side discloses.
Open-source artefacts of similar work are public — intrepidshape/elm-web3 and elm-web3-ui, both MIT, both distilled from production. The portfolio and lead-magnet docs cover the rest.
One human shipping the code. No outsourced black boxes, no contractor chain you've never met. The engagements that warrant additional capacity bring in named specialists case-by-case, never anonymously.
Founder · Lead Engineer
Bitcoin since 2010. Software for clients since 2017. Founded the studio in 2021. Ships the code, signs the engagement letters, runs the diagnostics, talks to the client. The work doesn't get handed off.
Selectivity is part of the offer. Naming the work we don't take is the cleanest way to describe the work we do.
Published terms, no hidden inclusions, no "premium tier" upsells. This is the shape every engagement takes — the only thing that changes is scope.
5-Day Diagnostic
A$1,800 ex-GST. Written diagnosis, prescription, three-option proposal. Credit-forward against the engagement.
One-page engagement letter
Three options high → low → middle. Agency countersigns first. Long-form contract isn't a separate document.
Fixed-fee delivery
40% deposit / 30% mid-point / 30% delivery. No hourly billing, no time-and-materials creep.
Foundry-tested code
Full unit + invariant coverage, Slither + Aderyn clean, deployment scripts checked in.
NatSpec + threat model
Every external function documented. Threat assumptions named explicitly, not implied.
Pre-Audit Hardening Pack
Every engagement runs through the 70-item readiness checklist before delivery. The same one we publish for free.
Verified, deployed, monitored
Source verified on the relevant explorer. Monitoring hooks (Tenderly / Defender) configured if you don't already have them.
30-day warranty
Bugs in delivered code are fixed at no charge for 30 days post-launch.
Full IP transfer on full payment
Source, contracts, deployment scripts. Fork, modify, resell — your right. No licence-back, no vendor lock-in.
Two-month termination notice
Either side. Transition handoff included — code, runbook, deployment access. Pre-paid fees refunded pro-rata.
Western Australian governing law
Mediated first, litigated only as a last resort. Liability capped at fees paid in the trailing 12 months.
Open-source by default
Where the work doesn't conflict with your IP, the patterns get distilled into our published packages. You don't pay for that distillation; you benefit from it on the next engagement.
// Anything not on this list is a change order, priced separately, never free.
A 30-minute fit conversation. Five questions: situation, target outcome, decision-makers, timing, criteria. From there, if there's fit, we send a paid Diagnostic Engagement Letter — A$1,800, credit-forward against the engagement that follows. The engagement proposal is the diagnostic's output, not its prerequisite.