Matt Lockyer is a blockchain engineer, developer relations professional, and consultant with expertise in the NEAR Protocol and Aurora EVM ecosystems. He is the founder of Soloblock Solutions Inc., a consultancy focused on token engineering and decentralized application development. Lockyer is a key contributor to the NEAR ecosystem, known for his work on projects designed to improve developer and user experiences. ^[8]

Education

Lockyer has a background in both computer science and academia. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science. Following his undergraduate studies, he pursued doctoral research at Simon Fraser University, earning a PhD in Interactive Arts and Technology in 2016. His doctoral work, which continued until 2018, centered on topics including motion affect, information visualization, computer graphics, and animation. ^[1]

Career

Lockyer began his career in academia, serving as an undergraduate teaching assistant at the University of British Columbia from 2008 to 2010. While pursuing his PhD at Simon Fraser University between 2010 and 2018, he held multiple teaching positions, including graduate teaching assistant, sessional lecturer, and lecturer. In these roles, he taught a diverse range of subjects such as functional and object-oriented programming, signal processing, computer vision, generative algorithms, mobile web application development, and information architecture.

His interest in blockchain technology began around 2010 during his academic career, and he later became more involved through participation in local Ethereum technology meetups. In 2018, Lockyer transitioned into the blockchain sector and founded Soloblock Solutions Inc., a consultancy focused on token engineering, smart contracts, and the development of decentralized applications, particularly those related to digital assets and the creative economy. In late 2019, he joined Harmony, where he worked in developer relations to support the growth of its open consensus platform.

From 2020 to early 2022, Lockyer served as the Developer Relations Director at NEAR Protocol on a contract basis. His work involved extensive developer support and technical contributions across various domains, including decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), wallets, multisignature systems, interoperability, and the development of Rust-based smart contracts.

Since 2022, he has continued to work within the NEAR ecosystem in a variety of roles spanning technical advising, integrations, partnerships, developer relations, and business development. His focus remains on building on the NEAR Protocol and its accompanying Aurora EVM environment, utilizing technologies like Rust, WebAssembly, and Ethereum-compatible tooling. As of May 2023, he was a Partner at Proximity Labs, where his work centered on developing DeFi infrastructure for the NEAR ecosystem. ^[2]​

Interviews

What Are Shade Agents?

In a February 2025 appearance on the NEAR DevHub livestream, Lockyer discussed the design and implementation of Shade Agents in a workshop-style session focused on their technical foundations. He described Shade Agents as autonomous systems that interact with web APIs and smart contracts while operating within trusted execution environments, with an emphasis on securely handling protocol funds and verifiable execution via remote attestation. The discussion covered deployment templates, configuration workflows, and the role of decentralized key management, highlighting an architecture in which keys are controlled by smart contracts rather than embedded in off-chain agents.

The session also addressed interoperability features that allow Shade Agents to act as controlled intermediaries between external data sources and on-chain logic, along with detailed explanations of agent registration, account generation, and access control. Lockyer outlined potential applications that extend beyond decentralized finance to areas such as gaming, automation, and AI-related workflows, positioning Shade Agents as a general-purpose framework for verifiable, non-custodial agent-based systems. ^[6]

NEAR Blockchain and Proximity

In a May 2023 interview on The Web3 Prof podcast, Lockyer discussed his entry into the blockchain space, tracing his interest back to early academic exposure around 2010 and subsequent involvement with Ethereum through local technology meetups. He described his recruitment into NEAR Protocol and his work there as an opportunity to engage with blockchain consensus mechanisms and core architectural design. Lockyer explained his role at Proximity Labs, which focuses on developing decentralized finance infrastructure within the NEAR ecosystem, and outlined how NEAR’s Layer 1 design differs from other networks in ways intended to improve developer usability.

The interview also addressed broader ecosystem trends, including developer adoption, multi-chain interoperability, front-end decentralization, and future development areas such as privacy and zero-knowledge technologies. Lockyer discussed the development of Keypom as a project aimed at reducing user onboarding complexity through mechanisms such as simplified event access and digital asset distribution without prior wallet setup, and noted early funding support from the NEAR Foundation, emphasizing a user-oriented design. ^[3]

Presentations

Shade Agents

At ETHDenver 2025, Lockyer presented Shade Agents as a method for building autonomous, non-custodial agents that can operate across multiple blockchain networks. The presentation examined the broader emergence of agent-based systems in Web2 and Web3 and identified persistent limitations, including challenges around decentralized key management, limited code verifiability, and the lack of on-chain guardrails for user funds. Lockyer described the Shade Agent architecture as a tightly integrated stack that combines worker-agent code with smart contracts to address these issues, using trusted execution environments for verification while keeping key management outside the agent itself. He outlined the process by which worker agents are registered and linked to contracts through code-hash-based access controls, enabling constrained and auditable execution. The talk also referenced live deployments and illustrated potential applications through an example agent that analyzed social media sentiment and distributed rewards, concluding with a discussion of broader use cases in areas such as financial infrastructure and markets. ^[5]

Keypom

At NEAR Day during ETHDenver 2023, Lockyer and Ben Kurrek presented Keypom as a framework to simplify Web3 onboarding by reducing the technical friction of wallet creation. The presentation outlined common barriers for new users, such as managing seed phrases, configuring networks, and navigating multiple wallets, and described an alternative approach in which users interact with applications before setting up a wallet. They discussed use cases including single-action interactions such as NFT distributions, multi-step experiences using QR codes, and time-based mechanisms like streaming payments. The presentation also covered event-based scenarios in which users could claim digital assets or tickets through simple web interfaces without prior wallet setup or internet connectivity, followed by optional post-event wallet creation to retain assets. Keypom’s trial account model was introduced to enable limited, application-specific interaction without full account creation, and the session concluded with an overview of how both developers and non-developers could integrate with or generate Keypom links with minimal technical requirements ^[7]