# Bits & Blocks

> A blockchain engineering firm for fintechs and financial institutions. Bits and Blocks LLC (QFC No. 3865, Doha) builds blockchain-based financial products end to end: product design and architecture through to smart contracts running in production on public networks.

Founded and led by Ala Eddine Battikh, co-author of AIP-76, a digital-asset composability standard in the Aptos Improvement Proposals repository (https://github.com/aptos-foundation/AIPs).

## Services
- Product design and architecture for blockchain-based financial systems
- Smart contract development in Move and Solidity, with production deployments on Aptos and EVM networks
- Blockchain migration: porting smart contracts and integrations from EVM to Move
- Confidential and privacy-preserving systems: on-chain confidentiality with auditability for institutional use
- Security review as part of every build engagement

## Who we work with
- Fintech companies building on blockchain
- Financial institutions exploring digital assets, stablecoins, and on-chain settlement

## Track record
- Founder co-authored AIP-76, a digital-asset composability standard on Aptos
- 16 mainnet deployments across production DeFi protocols, as of August 2026
- Cross-chain mainnet deployments using LayerZero
- Delivered Solidity-to-Move protocol ports, including a full port with a UI playground for client testing
- Contributed strategy vaults and orchestration-layer contracts to a Move-based yield platform later acquired by Movement

## Technologies
- Deployed on mainnet: Base, Aptos, Movement, Pyth, Circle (USDC)
- Languages: Move (Aptos, Movement), Solidity (Base and EVM networks)
- In production: Hypernative (security monitoring), Stripe (Web2 payment integrations)
- In build: CipherPhi on Stellar (Soroban), on-chain zakat for the Swiss Zakat Foundation

## On-chain philanthropy: CipherPhi
- CipherPhi is our on-chain zakat collection and redistribution platform on Stellar, built for the Swiss Zakat Foundation, an audited Swiss foundation that has run zakat distribution under federal supervision since 2020, in partnership with Swiss Islamic Finance.
- Donors calculate and pay their zakat into a pooled Soroban smart contract and receive cryptographic proof, from the Stellar ledger, that funds reached verified recipients.
- The contracts enforce the rules rather than report them after the fact: allocation across the eight zakat categories runs in the policy contract, and the custody contract releases funds only against a signed eligibility attestation verified on-chain.
- Privacy by design: funds and rules live on Stellar; identity and human judgment stay off-chain. No personal data reaches the ledger. Amounts and transaction timing are public, as on any public ledger.
- Architecture: three Soroban contracts, each limited to what it may touch. Custody sits in zakat_pool, Shariah parameters and allocation in policy, and eligibility attestation verification in attestation. The custody contract is immutable by construction: no in-place upgrade path exists over donor funds, and a change to custody logic ships as a new contract.
- Stack: Stellar, Soroban (Rust to Wasm), USDC/EURC via Stellar Asset Contracts, Privy onboarding, Stellar Disbursement Platform as the planned payout rail.
- Public technical architecture: https://github.com/bits-and-blocks/cipherphi
- Announcement (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aladdin-battikh_last-week-we-made-the-announcement-with-swiss-activity-7496605744977539072-rlAc

## Insights
- [On-chain philanthropy with the Swiss Zakat Foundation](https://www.bitsandblocks.tech/insights/on-chain-philanthropy): CipherPhi splits custody, policy and eligibility across three Soroban contracts and three key sets. The floor is collusion between two organisations.
- [AIP-76: Digital Asset composability](https://www.bitsandblocks.tech/insights/aip-76-digital-asset-composability-on-aptos): AIP-76 enforces a one-way composition tree and freezes each child on equip.
- [Invariant testing catches the states a unit test never reaches](https://www.bitsandblocks.tech/insights/invariant-testing-catches-the-states-a-unit-test-never-reaches): Forge generates random call sequences and asserts a property after each call, which finds multi-step insolvency and misses any property nobody wrote.
- [Compilation is not correctness](https://www.bitsandblocks.tech/insights/compilation-is-not-correctness): Zero-shot LLM Solidity matches ground-truth behaviour in 20 to 26 per cent of cases. The measurement covers isolated functions, not deployed systems.
- [The dollar leg keeps banking hours](https://www.bitsandblocks.tech/insights/the-dollar-leg-keeps-banking-hours): A stablecoin transfer settles in every hour of the week and the bank leg does not. The gap is carried as inventory, and inventory must sit somewhere signable.
- [Consensus, rebuilt: tracing Aptos' evolution from LibraBFT to AptosBFT](https://www.bitsandblocks.tech/insights/consensus-rebuilt-from-librabft-to-aptosbft): One consensus lineage from HotStuff to AptosBFT, with the cost each change carried and the measured effect where one was published.

## Company
- Bits and Blocks LLC
- Incorporated in the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC No. 3865) in August 2025
- Licensed to design and build software and to operate non-financial FinTech APIs
- Registered office: Doha Tower, West Bay, Doha, Qatar

## Contact
- Website: https://bitsandblocks.tech
- Email: info@bitsandblocks.tech
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/108891410
- GitHub: https://github.com/bits-and-blocks
- Book a call: https://calendly.com/aladdin-bitsandblocks/30min