Exo Technologies

Exo Technologies is a New York-based blockchain software development and R&D firm that builds production infrastructure for teams working on Solana and the broader SVM ecosystem. Founded by engineers who have been active on Solana since the network's earliest days, the company pairs deep protocol-level expertise with the full-stack delivery capability of a traditional software shop. Its client list spans seed-stage startups to large institutions, and its code underpins protocols with more than $1 billion in total value locked.

Founders and Team

The company was co-founded by Taylor Johnson and Tommy Johnson, two engineers with roots in both fintech and early Solana development.

Taylor Johnson previously held a consumer product leadership role at Blockfolio and FTX. He won the inaugural Solana Hackathon in 2020 building PsyOptions, a decentralized options protocol, and has since developed specializations in Token Extensions, the Pinocchio framework, and mobile integration for Solana-based products.

Tommy Johnson launched PsyOptions alongside Taylor and later co-founded ArmadaFi. His technical focus sits at the infrastructure layer: Merkle tree architectures, Node Consensus Networks (NCNs), and validator stack design. The broader team includes nine engineers and a growth lead, Trey Christensen, who brings a background in scaling SaaS products to millions of users.

What Exo Builds

Exo operates as a specialist engineering partner rather than a general-purpose agency. Its service areas reflect the specific technical gaps that Solana builders encounter at scale.

Smart Contracts and Protocol Migrations. Exo handles Ethereum-to-Solana migrations, custom vault implementations following standards such as ERC4626 and sRFC 37, and DeFi protocol integrations with institutional financial infrastructure including Fireblocks and the Circle APIs. The firm has shipped 26 protocols across DeFi, liquid staking tokens, DePIN, and real-world assets.

Compliance Automation. Institutional clients require on-chain permission systems that enforce AML/KYC rules in real time. Exo builds these as integrated compliance layers that combine custody systems, identity providers, and analytics dashboards, complete with audit trails that satisfy regulatory reporting requirements. Its whitelisted token systems enable regulated asset funds to implement subscription flows and portfolio management on-chain without sacrificing composability.

RWA Tokenization. The firm works on the infrastructure that brings real-world assets onto Solana, an area where it has contributed both client engagements and research. Clients in this vertical include Securitize, Agora, Calastone, and Libeara, among others.

Data Infrastructure. Beyond smart contracts, Exo designs data pipeline architecture, storage systems, and processing infrastructure for teams that need scalable off-chain backends to support on-chain activity.

Validator Operations. Exo runs its own Solana validator, which monitoring services note for a low skip rate — an indicator of reliable hardware and network connectivity. Operating a validator keeps the team close to Solana's consensus mechanics and informs its work on staking infrastructure.

Research and Protocol-Level Contributions

Exo publishes technical research alongside its client work, and two bodies of research illustrate where the firm is pushing Solana's capabilities.

Decentralized Governance for Stakers

The SIMD-228 vote in 2025 — a proposal to replace Solana's fixed inflation schedule with a dynamic, stake-weighted rate — exposed a structural gap in Solana's governance. The proposal drew the highest validator participation in the network's history, with 74% of staked supply and 910 validators casting votes, but it failed to reach the two-thirds supermajority required to pass. Critically, over 1.2 million individual stakers had no direct voice in the outcome; they were represented by their validators, with no independent mechanism to override or supplement that vote.

Exo, working alongside Turbin3 and contributors from the Solana Foundation, designed and built a Snapshot-based Node Consensus Network to close this gap. The system works in two stages. First, a network of operators independently generates Merkle roots of stake account snapshots at a target slot and submits them for consensus, establishing an authoritative, decentralized record of stake weights without requiring every account to register on-chain. Second, individual delegators can submit Merkle proofs to cast their own votes, automatically deducting their stake weight from their validator's total voting power. The result is a two-tier architecture where stakers can override their validator's position without requiring the validator's cooperation.

The engineering choices reflect practical constraints at Solana's scale. Merkle proof verification requires approximately 21 SHA256 operations at network scale. Exo built a lightweight Verifier service, backed by SQLite, that serves proof requests during voting windows. Load testing on AWS instances showed throughput of 7,278 requests per second on a c6a.large instance and 51,624 requests per second on a c6a.4xlarge — headroom well above the estimated 4,800 peak demand at full network participation.

The implementation consists of two on-chain programs: gov-v1, which handles stake weight consensus through operator voting, and govcontract, which manages proposals and verifies proof submissions via cross-program invocation. Both are open-source and available under the exo-tech-xyz GitHub organization.

A Canonical Vault Standard for Solana

The second major research initiative addresses a fragmentation problem in Solana's DeFi and RWA stack: the absence of a standardized vault interface. Ethereum settled on ERC4626 as a shared interface for tokenized vaults — a standard that enabled composable integrations across protocols without bespoke contract work at each connection point. Solana has no equivalent, which means every team building vaults for institutional funds, liquid staking, or yield strategies writes its own implementation, duplicates security audits, and ends up with integrations that do not compose cleanly with adjacent protocols.

Exo is developing a canonical vault standard for Solana at the Solana Foundation's request. The design integrates with sRFC 37, Solana's Token Access Control List standard, so that fund managers can enforce KYC and whitelist restrictions through a shared primitive rather than embedding compliance logic directly in vault contracts. The goal is to give RWA issuers and DeFi protocols a plug-and-play interface that reduces engineering time, concentrates audit surface area on a single well-tested implementation, and makes Solana's vault ecosystem composable with institutional financial infrastructure.

A working group is forming around the initiative, with feedback collection underway and implementation hardening planned to follow.

Clients and Track Record

Exo's client roster includes some of the most active builders in the Solana ecosystem: the Solana Foundation, Jito, Solana Mobile, Switchboard, Axiom, Arch Network, Gamma, Wasabi, and Multiliquid, alongside a range of institutional and startup clients in RWA and fintech verticals. Named clients include Securitize, Agora, Calastone, Doma, Keel, Libeara, Believe, Bags, Pye, Runner, and Inference.

The firm has delivered 26 protocols, employs nine engineers, and reports that code it has written is live in protocols managing over $1 billion in total value locked.

Open Source Presence

The exo-tech-xyz GitHub organization hosts 28 repositories, most written in Rust. The most widely referenced are pinocchio-project (a Rust template with 64 stars) and solana-governance (TypeScript governance tooling with 26 forks). The organization also maintains active forks of Jito Foundation repositories including jito-tip-router and jito-solana, consistent with its work in MEV and staking infrastructure.