ZANICAR

Background

Twenty years of building systems, leading teams, and shipping under real constraints — the record.

Portrait of Billa Coetsee

I’ve spent more than twenty years building technical systems and leading the people who build them — as an architect and engineer, and as the person accountable for the strategy around the work. The shape of the career is deliberate: enterprise infrastructure and security early on, a term of industry-body leadership in the middle, and most recently protocol engineering for self-sovereign blockchain networks. Three of those networks are now launched and running, across the Cosmos and Sui ecosystems.

What ties it together is a way of working more than any single domain. I’m most useful at the boundary between people and machines — turning business intent into technical specification, and technical reality back into terms a board can act on — and I build teams that cooperate rather than compete. What follows is the record. The thinking behind it lives on the rest of this site.

Key roles

  1. Managing Director Noctranet

    2008–present
    Consultancy

    The technology management consultancy I founded and run.

    Visit Noctranet
    • Migrated a national retailer (100+ stores) to a custom infrastructure solution within 30 days of first contact; unscheduled downtime practically eliminated by day 60, and point-of-sale response times cut from seconds to fractions of a second by day 90.
    • Designed a defence-in-depth security architecture (StrongSWAN IPSEC, OpenVPN) that held 99% uptime over a five-year lifespan with zero reported breaches and no data loss.
    • Built a progressive backup-and-recovery solution supporting rapid restores — used for everything from accidental-deletion recovery to occasional cyber-forensics.
    • Designed and deployed a cloud solution for a national education network operating under severe technological constraints.

  2. Technical Program Manager Talus Labs

    2025–2026
    Protocol engineering

    Led technical program delivery for Nexus, Talus Labs' decentralised agentic AI-workflow protocol on the Sui Network, and the agentic blockchain gaming platform built on it.

    • Delivered a production AI-agent-driven Texas Hold'em poker game to Sui Mainnet — the primary validation product for the Nexus protocol — navigating a high-velocity environment and four major product pivots.
    • Designed the team's Feature-Driven Development release framework, Improvement Proposal process, and GitHub-based engineering governance as the authoritative engineering source of truth.
    • Coordinated delivery across protocol engineering, frontend/Unity game clients, LLM/AI agent systems, and external development partners.
    • Applied Intent-Based Engineering to align product intent with technical execution, reducing rework through upstream constraint resolution.

  3. Protocol Engineering Manager Phi Labs (Archway)

    2023–2024
    Protocol engineering

    Led the protocol engineering team for Archway, an incentivised smart-contract network in the Cosmos ecosystem.

    • Delivered multiple fully-audited network upgrades, including critical emergency patches for security advisories in upstream dependencies.
    • Directed security-audit processes and upstream dependency integration.
    • Managed a distributed engineering team across multiple time zones.

  4. Protocol Engineer Ingenuity Build (Quicksilver)

    2022–2023
    Protocol engineering

    Contributed to the development and launch of Quicksilver, a liquid-staking protocol in the Cosmos ecosystem.

    • Implemented core protocol features using the Cosmos SDK and IBC.
    • Participated in security-audit processes and built Go-based blockchain infrastructure components.

  5. Chairman, South Africa Business Software Alliance (BSA)

    2014–2019
    Industry leadership

    Chaired the South African committee of BSA, the leading global advocate for the software industry before governments and in the international marketplace.

    bsa.org
    • Reduced software piracy through enforcement and a joint BSA–CIPC–DALRO initiative raising awareness of intellectual-property rights and Software Asset Management compliance.
    • Represented the software industry in policy discussions with the South African government.

Earlier roles

  • Blockchain Strategy Lead & COO — Claymore Capital · 2019–2020
  • Blockchain Strategy Consultant — MyBucks · 2019
  • Chief Technology Officer — Corepoint Consulting · 2011–2016
  • System Developer — Revelation Systems / PC Consultants · 2004–2007

Competencies

Leadership & management

Strategic technology planning · Cross-functional team leadership · Organisational development · Change management · Technical knowledge transfer

Technical

Systems architecture & engineering · Blockchain protocol development · Cloud computing · Security architecture · Software development

Skills

Programming

Go, JavaScript (expert) · Rust, C/C++, Java, TypeScript, PHP, Lua (advanced)

Blockchain

Cosmos SDK · CosmWasm · IBC · Sui · Move

Infrastructure

Linux · Cloud architecture · StrongSWAN IPSEC · OpenVPN

Databases

PostgreSQL · MySQL · BadgerDB · Dgraph

Education & membership

  • MSc, Technology Management (with distinction) — University of Pretoria · 2008–2009
  • BSc (Hons), Management of Technology — University of Pretoria · 2006–2007
  • BSc, Information & Knowledge Systems — University of Pretoria · 2002–2004
  • Member, Golden Key International Honour Society

Verifiable links