Extropy

Extropy is a blockchain consultancy and education provider founded in Oxford, UK, in 2015. Operating under the tagline "Making blockchain knowledge accessible," the firm combines smart contract security auditing, zero-knowledge proof research, and developer training across multiple blockchain ecosystems including Solana.

The company was founded by Laurence Kirk, who began tracking blockchain technology in 2013. When Ethereum introduced programmable smart contracts, Kirk saw an opportunity to build a firm that could make the emerging technology comprehensible and useful for startups and organisations that lacked deep cryptographic expertise. He assembled a multidisciplinary team spanning cryptography, embedded systems, IT security, and software engineering — backgrounds that reflect the cross-disciplinary demands of blockchain work. The Oxford location gives the firm proximity to academic research in formal verification and cryptography.

Education as a Core Pillar

Education is central to Extropy's identity. The firm operates Extropy Academy at academy.extropy.io, a learning platform focused on smart contract security, decentralised finance, and zero-knowledge proofs. The platform offers hands-on courses, curated lessons, and expert-guided workshops designed to give developers practical, deployable blockchain skills.

Extropy's most visible educational partnership is with Encode Club, a Web3 accelerator backed by the Solana Foundation and other ecosystem sponsors. Extropy has delivered the Encode x Solana Bootcamp, a six-week online programme running Monday through Thursday. Led by Laurence Kirk and a dedicated team of teaching assistants, each session lasts roughly ninety minutes and is followed by homework assignments. The curriculum moves from Rust fundamentals and Solana architecture through the Anchor framework, the Solana Program Library, NFTs via Metaplex, DeFi protocol design, and security best practices. Cohorts conclude with group projects that ship real Solana programs on-chain.

Course materials from these bootcamps are publicly available in the ExtropyIO/SolanaBootcamp GitHub repository, allowing developers to study independently outside structured cohort periods. Extropy has also partnered with Encode Club on ZK-focused programmes including a zkML Bootcamp covering the intersection of zero-knowledge proofs and machine learning.

Security Auditing

Since 2017, Extropy has built a security auditing practice covering Ethereum smart contracts and zero-knowledge proof protocols. The firm employs manual review, static analysis, formal verification, and automated testing in combination. Formal verification allows auditors to construct mathematical proofs about program behaviour, providing stronger guarantees than test coverage alone.

Their audit scope spans multiple languages and virtual machines: Solidity for EVM-compatible contracts, Rust for Solana programs, Cairo for StarkNet contracts, and various zkVMs. The firm has collaborated with leading ecosystems including Base, StarkNet, and MINA. Their ZK auditing practice focuses specifically on vulnerability classes common in proof systems — under-constrained circuits, overflow issues in finite field arithmetic, and soundness failures that allow false proofs to verify.

Research and Publications

Extropy publishes original blockchain research through its Medium publication and Extropy Academy. A notable 2024–2025 study analysed arbitrage and MEV markets across four ecosystems: Ethereum, Solana, Optimism (and Base), and StarkNet.

The Solana findings are particularly detailed. The analysis found that Solana's MEV landscape follows a power-law distribution in which the top three arbitrage bots control roughly 60% of market activity. Despite more than 90 million annual arbitrage transactions, profit per trade averages just 1.58 USD on Solana, compared to hundreds or thousands of dollars per successful trade on Ethereum. Operators running Solana arbitrage infrastructure spend between 1,800 and 3,800 USD monthly on dedicated RPC nodes to compete effectively. By contrast, Ethereum's MEV market operates as a tight oligopoly of fewer than 20 dominant entities, with arbitrageurs routing over 90% of revenues back to block builders as bribes. On low-cost chains like Optimism, cheap transactions create a spam paradox where bots flood sequencers with duplicate submissions even when doing so is economically wasteful.

Alongside this research, Extropy publishes weekly Extropy Security Bytes, a digest of significant security incidents across Web3. Longer research pieces cover quantum cryptography threats to Ethereum, EIP protocol analyses, and year-end security loss reports.

Consulting and Development

The consulting arm supports startups and organisations seeking to build on blockchain infrastructure. Services include distributed application development, zero-knowledge system design, domain-specific language research, ICO and STO due diligence, and protocol-level security reviews. The firm positions itself as a practical bridge between academic cryptography research and real-world deployment, reinforced by its Oxford base and the team's backgrounds in formal methods and applied cryptography.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Extropy's engagement with Solana spans education, research, and development. Through Encode Club bootcamps sponsored by the Solana Foundation, the firm has trained multiple cohorts of Solana developers in Rust and Anchor-based program development, creating a direct pipeline of Solana-capable engineers. Its cross-chain MEV research provides some of the most detailed publicly available data on Solana's arbitrage market structure. The ExtropyIO GitHub hosts Solana course materials, and the firm's audit practice covers Rust programs, making Extropy a resource for Solana projects seeking independent security review.

As of early 2026, Extropy.io remains active, with regular blog posts, ongoing educational programming, and continued audit engagements. The firm operates from Oxford, UK, under founder and CEO Laurence Kirk.