TravisWyche

Existential

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

Sole architect and engineer of the system. Author of the protocol specification. Full time since January 2026.

• Built a local-first Oracle that works over a person’s own notes on their own machine: twelve-stage ingestion, concept extraction, embeddings, deterministic scoring and graph clustering. In daily development.
• Designed privacy membranes enforced in code rather than in policy, covering every boundary a contribution crosses: deterministic identity scrub, sanitization, decorrelated verification and fail-closed quarantine.
• Built a publishing Oracle that composes public documents out of private material, gated by outbound hygiene, a leakage judge running on a separate model family, and atomic signed publication.
• Implemented signed, recorded deliberation between the Oracles of independent organisations, each holding an append-only ledger of what it said and heard.
• Implemented anonymous attestation on the Ethereum Attestation Service and Semaphore, demonstrating a full attest, verify and revoke cycle on a test network.
• Authored the Existential Protocol v0 specification: seven parts, forty-one ratified rulings.

Built with one co-founder on personal savings, with no outside capital. Six prior proofs of concept preceded the current system (Existential v1–v6).

Allo Capital

Strategic Advisor, Category Creation and Strategy

Defined intent-based allocation as a funding category over an eight-month engagement, delivering a forty-five page category strategy.

Gitcoin

Art Director, Narrative Design and Lead Writer

Directed Coordination Comics, a five-part narrative series translating Ethereum ecosystem mechanism design for a general audience.

DAOhaus

Research and Design, UX/UI and Special Projects

Led the Yeeter (web3 crowd-funding project) redesign onto Moloch v3 contracts, shipped across five chains over six months. Ran Creator Collector Reciprocity, a five-week research project published as a three-part series.

Supermodular

DAO Architect, Governance Design and Community Lead

Designed and ran Pluriverse, an eighteen-month transmedia experiment across a four-organisation federation.

Raid Guild

Research and Design, Senior UX/UI Specialist

Delivered research and interface design across client engagements in decentralised coordination.

Death Dialogues

Eighteen long-form conversations with Indigenous knowledge holders recovering stolen land, organisers distributing funds under military dictatorship, systems engineers and philosophers. Funded by Moloch DAO. Introduced semantic coordination failure: the observation that decentralised coordination fails because complexity outruns the language available to attend to it. That observation is the thesis Existential is built on.

Creator Collector Reciprocity

Three-part series from a five-week research project at DAOhaus on reciprocity between creators and the people who sustain their work.

WisCAM Research Report

Forty pages, fifteen phenomenological interviews, more than 120 sources. Argues for a category of value that is non-rival, multiplicative, context-dependent and network-emergent. Direct antecedent of the Existential Protocol.

European Graduate School

PhD Studies

Studied under Benjamin Bratton, Siegfried Zielinski, Avital Ronell and Slavoj Žižek. Dissertation on optico-centrism: what archives and vision privilege over the embodied and the ephemeral, an optical theory of consciousness via art history.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Master of Fine Arts

California College of the Arts

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting