What is Centennial Systems?
Centennial Systems is a small practice for founders, operators, and enterprises building in crypto, fintech, and AI. We take on a handful of engagements at a time across product, security, and embedded engineering, and stay close to the work until it ships.
The way we work with clients
We dive into the smallest of details before engaging. If the fit is wrong, we say so in a day and point you to someone better suited. This is not a sales posture. It is how the practice survives the weight of its own work.
Engagements come in three shapes. A product engagement (fixed fee, scoped to weeks) covering focused strategy and embedded execution on a specific area: a launch, a pricing change, a new market, a priority workstream. A security and opsec retainer (ongoing) where we own the program: adversarial review, audit readiness, incident posture, and fractional CISO coverage. An embedded build (project fee, custom scope) where we ship to production and hand it to your team.
Every engagement is scoped to a named initiative with a named owner on your side. We do not run multi-workstream programs in parallel across one account. One brief, one principal, one thread.
We keep our calendar light on purpose so the work gets the attention it needs. If we cannot start soon, we will say so in the first reply.
The mission
The financial systems being built today (custody networks, settlement rails, derivatives venues, stablecoin mechanisms, bridges) will carry trillions of dollars in transit a decade from now. The cost of a wrong architectural decision is not a quarterly miss. It is a recovery event, a regulatory response, or a user base that never comes back.
Teams building this infrastructure do not need another vendor. They need the people they would hire into their own org chart if those people were available full-time. Centennial exists to be that bench on a per-engagement basis: a founder who has shipped at scale, a partner who has run adversarial review at depth, and a small circle of collaborators whose names we vouch for.
We price on outcome, not on hours. We refuse engagements we cannot do well. We publish the thinking when we are allowed to. We protect the work when we are not. And we believe that the name we hold at the end of the decade is the only compounding asset this practice has.
Who we are
Sid led retail crypto-backed lending at Coinbase, scaling the loan book past $2B on DeFi rails. Prior to Coinbase he was an investor at Nascent, has been active in DeFi since 2018, has built businesses in derivatives and emerging markets, and actively advises founders across fintech and crypto.
Sujith is a lead security researcher who contracts with Spearbit. His work covers adversarial review of custody flows, smart-contract and architecture audits, and fractional CISO coverage for teams between security leaders.
We are in New York, San Francisco, and India. Reach us at sid@centennial.systems.