ZANICAR

Background

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

Download résumé (PDF)
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.

One thread runs through a good deal of it. Around 2014 I spent weeks reconstructing manipulated records from system logs and authentication trails during a set of financial audits, and what struck me afterwards was that the permission structure involved had been functionally correct the whole time. It was simply incomprehensible to the people responsible for it. That sent me looking for access control a privileged user cannot quietly subvert, and the question carried through Byzantine fault tolerance and consensus mechanisms into protocol engineering. It came back later as an identity library, an architecture generalized out of building that library, and a framework built on the architecture. Vigil Keep is the philosophy underneath, and it started earlier still, in my dissertation research. This site is built with the workflow template at the end of that line.

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, and the cloud-computing member of the education consortium below.

    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 the architecture and underlying infrastructure for the education programme: the data server and backup layers, software-defined networks walling each customer deployment off from the others, the IPSEC cloud nodes, the OpenVPN instances, and the bridges between them — in 2011/2012.
    • 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' decentralized 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 incentivized 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. Blockchain Strategy Lead Claymore Capital

    2019–2020
    Industry leadership

    Led blockchain and remittance strategy for this fintech group, and held strategy, technical oversight and the COO role at CreditStore, its online retail subsidiary built around an integrated credit line.

    • Designed crypto exchange and remittance systems to South African ADLA licence requirements, carrying AML/KYC obligations into the architecture rather than bolting them on afterwards.
    • Developed fintech systems architecture integrating traditional finance with blockchain settlement.

  6. Blockchain Strategy Consultant MyBucks

    2019
    Consultancy

    Strategic consulting on blockchain implementation for a Frankfurt Stock Exchange-listed company.

    • Created a roadmap for crypto exchange and remittance systems aligned with international banking regulation, and advised on AML/KYC compliance across multiple jurisdictions.

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

    2014–2019
    Industry leadership

    Noctranet held the institutional membership and I represented it; the South African committee then elected me chairman in my personal capacity. BSA is 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.

  8. Founder & Lead The Technology Ecosystems Consortium

    2011–2016
    Industry leadership

    A three-firm delivery alliance I formed — Noctranet, Corepoint Consulting and PC Consultants — to build and operate an education management information system: a specialized ERP designed and built by PC Consultants, spanning student administration, finance, asset management and GIS overlays. I was CTO of Corepoint; Noctranet was the cloud-computing member.

    • Led the integration strategy that got the three firms’ different technologies and stacks working together in unison.
    • Drafted the legal contracts with the consortium attorneys, and developed the business model with my partners from each member firm.
    • Designed regulated third-party access so an external oversight body could reach live client financials under read-only permissions, with its own reporting and without exposing the wider system — an access-control and data-governance problem as much as a networking one.
    • Solved across the full range of customer constraints, from the latest technology to the lowest. Campuses raised an IPSEC channel into the infrastructure and simply opened the application; one institution had no network access at all and was served by a weekly consolidation cycle run from physical media.
    • Provided digital forensics to independently initiated financial audits, correlating evidence across every layer of the estate — application users and permissions, directory group memberships, IPSEC and OpenVPN access paths, and physical machine addresses tied back to campus locations through the system’s own asset-management data. Application, OS and network logs all came into it. That enquiry established insider privilege abuse, and it is what turned my work toward superuser-resistant system design.

  9. Chief Technology Officer Corepoint Consulting

    2011–2016
    Industry leadership

    Directed technology strategy and implementation for this consulting firm, one of the member firms of the consortium above.

    Earlier roles

    • System Developer — Revelation Systems (DataCyte) · 2007
    • System Developer & Consultant — PC Consultants · 2004–2007
    • Network & Hardware Technician — PC Consultants · 2001

    Competencies

    Leadership & management

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

    Technical

    Systems architecture & engineering · Blockchain protocol development · Identity & access management · Multi-signature & key management · Digital forensics (system level) · 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

    Security

    Security architecture, Defence-in-depth design, IAM & permission-model design (DAG delegation, session/token lifecycle, MFA), N-of-M multi-signature design, Digital forensics (log and authentication-trail reconstruction), Security-audit direction, AML/KYC and licence-regime design (ADLA), OWASP conformance & attack-surface enumeration

    Infrastructure

    Linux · Cloud architecture · StrongSWAN IPSEC · OpenVPN

    Databases

    PostgreSQL · MySQL · BadgerDB · Dgraph

    Frameworks & open source

    • Vigil Keep Philosophy

      A philosophy of active vigilance and enduring preservation, applied to software architecture and organizational knowledge. It grew out of my 2009 dissertation research and then the Technology Ecosystems Consortium.

    • Layered Capability Architecture Architecture

      Capability → Constraints → Construction — separating what a system can do, what it should do, and how it is built. Generalized out of building VK Auth; its worked example is that system's own design problem.

    • Intent-Based Engineering Framework

      A framework for self-describing systems: decisions and their reasoning captured systematically so systems stay comprehensible, against the archaeological decay every long-lived system tends toward. Built on the architecture above.

    • IBE Workflow Template Tooling

      A reusable project template for sustained AI-augmented work, extracted from IBE. This site is built with it.

    • VK Auth Open source · Go

      An identity and access management library for composable systems — permissions as a directed acyclic graph with enforced structural invariants, delegation-only and every permission traceable to its source; session and token lifecycle including agent-bound identity. Began as research into superuser-resistant access control after the consortium audits.

    Education & membership

    • MSc, Technology Management (with distinction) — University of Pretoria · 2008–2009
    • Research report: An Integrated Value Proposition Model for 21st Century Organizations (a sustainable, responsible technology-driven innovation framework) — grounded-theory research into how organizations attract and retain skilled professionals, sustain high-performance culture, and unlock innovative capacity. Proposes a value-proposition triad of human capital, cultural capital and innovative capacity.
    • BSc (Hons), Management of Technology — University of Pretoria · 2006–2007
    • BSc, Information & Knowledge Systems — University of Pretoria · 2002–2004
    • Binance Africa Blockchain Course & Hackathon — built in Solidity · the entry point into blockchain engineering
    • Member, Golden Key International Honour Society

    Verifiable links