Riccardo Spagni

Entrepreneur, builder, privacy absolutist.

Privacy, AI, cryptography, and autonomous agents.

Founding member of the Monero Core Team and its former Lead Maintainer. Co-founded Tari Labs and built the Tari protocol, a programmable proof-of-work blockchain with on-chain privacy. Invented OpenAlias, co-created Yat. In Bitcoin since 2011. Holds 21 patents, primarily in blockchain and decentralised identity. Now building local, private tools for developers and AI agents.


View Current Work
Riccardo Spagni
Current Focus

Open-Source Projects

Open-source tools for developers and AI agents.

nsh

AI shell assistant. Wraps your shell in a PTY, captures context, turns plain-language requests into commands. Multi-step agent loop, MCP support, persistent memory, P2P remote access.

nsh.tools GitHub

uhoh

Snapshot and recovery for when your AI agent gets overconfident. Watches project folders, takes content-addressed snapshots, lets you diff or restore any point in time. Includes a database guardian and agent monitor with MCP proxy interception.

uhoh.it GitHub

llm-proxifier

Proxy server for local LLaMA models. OpenAI-compatible API, automatic lifecycle management.

GitHub

llm-chatifier

Terminal chat client that auto-detects and connects to any chat API endpoint.

GitHub
Advisory

Wagyu

Bringing XMR to DeFi without nuking its privacy in the process.

External advisor to Wagyu, providing Monero protocol guidance, stress-testing the architecture, and thinking adversarially about every way it could break, get exploited, or get gamed. Bridges are just another attack surface and they deserve the same rigour as the base protocol - over a decade of Monero threat modelling brought to bear on a hard problem most people wrote off as impossible.

wagyu.xyz
Riccardo Spagni
What I Care About

Privacy is a right, not a feature.

I've spent over a decade building systems where privacy is structural, not bolted on. Monero, OpenAlias, Tari, Yat, and now a set of AI and developer tools. The common thread is that everything I ship is open source, and the privacy properties come from the design, not from trusting a third party.

I got into Bitcoin in 2011 because I thought financial privacy was worth fighting for. I still do. The tools have changed, but the principle hasn't.


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Foundational Work

Where it started.

Nearly two decades spent as an entrepreneur, and working on projects with a focus on financial privacy, decentralised identity, and censorship-resistant systems.

Domains

Core Expertise

Privacy-Preserving Tech Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Applied Cryptography AI & Autonomous Agents Open-Source Development MCP & AI Tooling Decentralised Identity Financial Privacy Rights Systems Architecture