There is a massive, widening gap between academic brilliance and silicon-level implementation. You can write the most elegant paper in the world, but if your prover requires 100GB of RAM to execute a basic trace, you haven't built a protocol, you've built a research project that collapses under its own weight.

I don't have "strategic planning" committees or HR-mandated consensus. If Hekate's core doesn't meet my performance standards, I rewrite it in 48 hours. This agility is a weapon. I want to prove that a single engineer, driven by physics and zero-copy principles, can wreck the unit economics of a multi-million dollar venture-backed startup.

Disrupting inefficient financial models is more than fun—it's necessary. The current "safe" hiring meta (US-only, HR-compliant, resume-padded candidates) is a strategic failure. While industry leaders focus on compliance, state-sponsored actors like Lazarus are eating their lunch.

You don't need "safe" candidates. You need predators. You need the difficult, inconvenient outliers who don't need a visa to outcode your entire department. Hekate is a reminder that in deep-tech, capital is noise, but performance is the only signal that matters.

In Hekate's Keccak AIR, the relationship is ~25 trace rows per 1 Keccak-f[1600] permutation.

2^24 Rows = The raw size of the execution trace matrix (height). ~671k Permutations = The actual cryptographic workload (equivalent to hashing ~90MB of data).

The benchmark compares the cost to prove the same cryptographic work, regardless of internal AIR row mapping.

THE MANIFESTO: https://github.com/oumuamua-corp/hekate