Security
SEAL Certifications — building an operational security certification program for the crypto industry: incident response, multisig operations, treasury, workspace and DNS security.
SEAL Wargames — live incident-response drills for protocol engineering teams, launched alongside SEAL 911.
Shield3 — co-founder. Incident response, security, and compliance for onchain businesses and protocols.
- 2022–23
Metagov — research fellow.
Art
Human Unreadable, Act III — world premiere at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in artport: A History of Internet Art, November 19–22. Engineer, with Operator.
Repeat as Necessary — a live performance driven by a “performance operating system” linking seven dancers to forty on-chain works, Bodrum. Engineered the system, with Operator. 2026 Lumen Prize finalist.
- 2024
Coddess Variations — a collection between sculpture and dance, with the Paris Opera and sculptor Hermine Bourdin. Engineered the choreographic system.
Human Unreadable — on-chain choreography with Operator: engineered the generative model and motion-data pipeline. Lumen Prize winner; released on Art Blocks.
Writing, standards, talks
Devcon SEA — “Running Wargames to Prepare Protocol Teams for Incident Response.”
“Exploiting Inattention and Misconfigurations in Composable Governance Systems” — MIT Computational Law Report; technical writeup.
ERC-5554 — NFT legal use, repurposing, and remixing, with the COALA Licensing Taskforce.
ERC-4824 — common interfaces for DAOs, with DAOstar.
Press
Unchained — on error correction in DeFi: most incidents are operational failures and misconfiguration, not code.
1A, WAMU/NPR — “Cyber Monday: a crypto crime case study.”
Blockworks — on the launch of SEAL 911 and emergency drills for protocol teams.
Short bio
Isaac Patka is a security researcher and founder. His work centers on operational security and governance: how systems fail through human error and misconfiguration rather than through code. He is co-founder of Shield3 and leads the Wargames and Certifications initiatives at the Security Alliance (SEAL), where he runs live incident-response drills for engineering teams and is building an operational security certification program for the crypto industry. He contributes to open standards and has published on governance security with the MIT Computational Law Report. He is also the engineer behind the artist duo Operator’s on-chain choreography works, including the 2023 Lumen Prize–winning Human Unreadable and Coddess Variations with the Paris Opera. A former semiconductor electrical engineer, he entered Ethereum in 2017 hunting bug bounties.