About

Hi, I'm Alfonso de la Rocha (also known as @adlrocha online). Engineer and researcher turned founder. I spent close to a decade in research at places like Protocol Labs and Telefónica R&D before founding my own startups. Their fates varied: from acquisition to bankruptcy. I still do engineering and build startups.

Background

Before Chainalysis, I co-founded Finisterra Labs, where we built Baselight, an LLM interpretability and verifiability platform that reached 3,000+ registered users, on top of a query engine I designed and implemented. Chainalysis acquired the company in 2026.

Before founding Finisterra Labs, I spent 4+ years at Protocol Labs working on some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems and blockchain technology. Some highlights:

• InterPlanetary Consensus (IPC) - A framework to scale blockchain networks with custom VMs and syscalls
• Filecoin Indexing System - Core database infrastructure for content routing
• Go-f3 - End-to-end testing framework for Filecoin's Fast Finality (F3) rollout, with FilOz
• Beyond Bitswap & ResNetLab - Research on file-exchange and distributed systems

Along the way I also spent six months contributing research to Project Abundance, an attempt at a next-generation blockchain architecture that fully resolves the blockchain trilemma. Earlier still, I led Telefónica's R&D blockchain team, shipping production deployments and filing several patents.

Writing & Community

I write Beyond The Code, a weekly technical newsletter. As an avid reader, I am continuously reading and trying to learn new things (I know, kind of a nerdy hobby). As Richard Feynman once said, "if you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it. The best way to learn is to teach." So the main purpose of the newsletter is to explain in simple terms the things that I learn. You win, and I win.

In practice that means hard technical topics made legible: LLM internals (KV cache, quantisation, context windows), distributed systems, on-chain infrastructure, AI agents, and an opinionated take on what it all means for engineers. I've published weekly for over two years, without gaps, and several posts have reached the Hacker News front page. I sometimes write featured pieces or technical breakdowns by request.

I also co-host AI Socratic Madrid, a community running Socratic discussions about AI.

Interests

I'm deeply interested in the intersection of distributed systems, AI, physics and hardware. I believe in open-source, decentralisation, and building technology that empowers individuals rather than concentrating power in the hands of a few.

When I'm not coding, I enjoy reading about finance, investment, physics, philosophy, and thinking about how technology can create a more equitable future.

Get in Touch

I'm always happy to chat about distributed systems, AI, physics, finance or potential collaborations.