Lawrence Plante · Mount Dora, FL · Open to remote (US)
Four products in five years. Each one built on the last.
I founded Dark Oak Studios in 2021 and ran it for five years. We won two consecutive Ripple XRPL grants, shipped a game platform, extracted it into reusable infrastructure, then built a second game on top of our own infrastructure. I wrote the server that ties those last two together. Now I want to do this work on someone else's team.
$250K
in Ripple XRPL grants, won and delivered
$6M+
on-chain trading volume, fully organic
100+
endpoint API platform shipped
5 yrs
founder and technical lead
Most portfolios are a list of unrelated projects. Mine is one arc.
Every product here exists because the one before it did. That compounding is the actual skill, and it is the thing I would bring to a team on day one.
2022 · Origin
XRP Junkies Social Club
One of the earliest XLS-20 NFT projects on the XRP Ledger, built in Unity. I specced and QA'd the generative pipeline: weighted-trait randomization driven by scriptable objects, programmatic 2048x2048 renders out of Unity, and JSON metadata generation.
2023 · First grant, $100K
Junction, the game platform
Won our first Ripple XRPL grant and shipped a platform that put NFT and token mechanics inside real games. Loot boxes and claim flow, an in-app shop, community voting, Firebase. It also carried the XRP Ledger ecosystem's first Xaman wallet integration running inside Unity.
2023 – 2026 · Second grant, $150K
Nexus, extract the infrastructure
The insight that won the second grant: the mechanics we hard-coded into one game were worth more as infrastructure other studios could run on. I made that case to the funder, then directed a senior contract team through the Laravel 11 build while owning every spec, QA pass and release sign-off.
2024 – 2025 · The proof
SCRAPT, build on your own platform
Rebuilt in Unity 6 and shipped on top of Nexus, which is the real test of whether the extraction actually worked. I wrote the authoritative game server sitting between the Unity client and the platform API myself, end to end. It is the best engineering work I have done.
Selected work
Running a studio means some things you write and some things you lead. Both are real skills and they are not the same skill, so every project below is tagged with which one it was. You should be able to trust the rest of this page because of that. Most of the code is in private repos and each project is written up as a case study with verifiable numbers, but the public repositories are linked further down.
SCRAPT
NestJS · Fastify · Prisma · Redis
SCRAPT game server
BuiltThe authoritative backend that makes a game economy impossible to forge
A NestJS on Fastify service sitting between a Unity 6 client and the Nexus platform. Ten Prisma models, three layered auth guards, and server-side validation of every run. Written entirely by me.
Personal build · 100% my own code
Read the case studyNexus
100+ endpoints · Laravel core · Unity C# SDK
Nexus
DirectedA 100+ endpoint API platform for Web3 rewards, commerce, and event-driven payouts
Grant-funded infrastructure platform on the XRP Ledger: reward distribution, in-game commerce, and payment bridges, delivered by a senior team I hired and directed.
Founder, product & technical lead
Read the case study
StaxBacktester
BuiltOptions-signal analytics and backtesting for a live Discord trading workflow
Solo-built fintech platform: parses Discord trade alerts into structured data, models P&L after fees, and backtests exit strategies to find where the edge actually is.
Personal project · all my own code
Read the case studyJunction
$100K grant · XLS-20 pioneer · first XUMM-in-Unity
Junction
ContributedThe Web3 gaming platform that put NFT and token mechanics inside real games
Dark Oak's first grant-funded product: a gaming platform bridging traditional game mechanics with on-chain rewards, and home to two XRPL firsts.
Founder & developer · 41% of commits, 2nd of 4 contributors
Read the case study
Bar inventory & shift handoff
BuiltA PWA that replaced paper par sheets and group-text handoffs at a working bar
PIN sign-in, par-status color coding, and end-of-night state logging, built for the actual 2 a.m. close. Two full versions shipped.
Personal project · all my own code
Read the case study
Level 8 digital menu
BuiltThe guest menu is the surface. The staff admin behind it is the product.
React + TypeScript menu with a Cognito-gated admin where managers change items, prices, and availability in seconds, no deploy required. Live in production at the venue today.
Personal project · all my own code
Read the case studyCode you can read
Most of what I have worked on lives in private studio repositories, which is not much use to you. These four are public right now. Where the code is mine I say so, and where it is the studio's I say that instead.
Async Python service streaming XRP Ledger data into TimescaleDB. asyncpg, websockets, aiohttp, and five hand-written SQL migrations. Entirely my own code.
MIT-licensed Node and Express server behind the Xaman wallet integration: login, payload, NFT list, claim, sign and logout. Studio code I specced and QA'd.
Unity WebGL build that generates NFT artwork on demand in the browser. Front end for the generative pipeline I specced and QA'd. There is a live demo you can click.
The loot crate front end from the Junction era. Studio code, included because it is public and readable rather than because it is the most interesting thing here.
Also built
WAX NFT project
Co-built and launched a blockchain NFT project in summer 2021, before Dark Oak existed. Roughly $30K personal revenue in one summer.
Client work
Designed and built a teaching portfolio site for an educator's job search, delivered end to end from content to hosting.
Technical skills
Everything here is backed by shipped work you can see above.
Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Python
- PHP
- C#
- SQL
- HTML & CSS
Frontend
- React
- Next.js
- Vite
- Tailwind CSS
- PWA development
Backend & APIs
- Node.js
- NestJS
- Fastify
- FastAPI
- Laravel (MVC)
- REST API design
- JWT & auth guards
- OpenAPI
- WebSockets
Data
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Redis
- TimescaleDB
- Supabase
- Drizzle ORM
- SQLAlchemy
- schema design & migrations
Cloud & Infra
- AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, Amplify)
- Docker & Compose
- Railway
- VPS management
- cron automation
Working with AI
- Cursor
- Claude
- Codex
- Anthropic API
- OpenAI API
Game & Web3
- Unity C# SDK work
- XRPL
- wallet integration
- tokenomics
Practices
- Technical specs
- QA & release testing
- Vitest
- Git & PR workflow
- developer docs
About
I started Dark Oak Studios in 2021 and ran it for five years: a distributed senior team, roughly half a million dollars in lifetime capital, and two consecutive Ripple Foundation grants won and delivered. I ran the hiring (300+ applicants, about 60 interviews), the funder relationship, the specs, the QA, and a good share of the code.
On the split between building and leading. On Nexus I hired engineers who were faster at raw implementation than I was, and putting them on the critical path while I held the specs, the QA and the funder relationship was the right call for the company. On my own work the balance is the reverse: the SCRAPT game server, StaxBacktester, the menu system and the bar app are my code, end to end. Every project on this page says which one it was, and that is deliberate.
In 2026 I committed to the software side full time. I'm looking for full-stack engineering, or technical product and delivery work, on a remote team that wants someone who has carried a product from a spec through a release and answered to a funder for the result. B.S. in Business Management from Florida State with a CS minor and about 50 credit hours of computer science coursework.
Let's talk.
Email is the fastest way to reach me. If you're hiring for a developer seat, grab the developer resume; for product or technical program roles, there's a version for that too.