John Forfar
AI Engineer at OwnX · Melbourne, Australia · Philippines
I build AI that runs on hardware you own instead of someone else’s cloud — and I teach thousands of developers how to run it themselves.
Who I am
Fifteen years of shipping infrastructure, from leading 65+ engineers on automation at BHP to writing Rust, NixOS and TypeScript for decentralised AI. Australian military veteran. Master of Computer Science (AI) at Monash, MBA at UWA.
I founded Solana Australia and grew it from zero to a national developer community, wrote 50+ articles at solana.blog, built and sold Solhack, and shipped three Unity games. Since 2024 I have been the developer-facing edge of Openmesh and OpenX Network — 40+ global events, a ~3,000-participant hackathon, course content for a 6,000-developer portal, and a 50,000-subscriber technical newsletter.
Today I am an AI Engineer at OwnX, building the ownership layer for personal intelligence, and I publish everything I learn on YouTube and here.
What I own here
OwnX is where the line I have been building along for six years arrives: Openmesh made the compute sovereign, OpenX Network made the models reachable without a middleman, and OwnX turns that into something a normal person actually owns — their AI, their data, their infrastructure.
My part is the developer-facing edge. I build the demos and the tooling that prove the stack works end to end — a CLI that deploys a sovereign app in four commands, hardware attestation that proves an output came from the machine it claims, agent systems running with no external API key in the path — then I get it into developers’ hands through workshops, hackathons, documentation, video and open source.
I have done this exact job before, at protocol scale and from zero: founding a national developer community, running the accelerator that shipped 1,000+ apps, and mentoring 2,000+ builders. That is what I am doing for OwnX.
Where I have built
AI Engineer · OwnX
Building the ownership layer for personal intelligence — the AI, data and infrastructure people actually own.
- Developer-facing tooling, demos and adoption
Developer Relations / Full-Stack · OpenX Network & Openmesh
The developer edge of decentralised AI infrastructure: NixOS app deployment, Solidity review, multi-arch bare-metal deployments, and the community around it.
- 40+ global events, 600+ attendees
- ~3,000-participant global AI & Web3 hackathon
- 50,000+ subscriber technical newsletter
- Course content for a 6,000-developer portal
- Base Mini App Factory — 1,000+ apps deployed
Product Manager & DevRel · SOVRUN
Ecosystem growth for autonomous worlds and AI-driven games on the Sovrun SDK, MUD and ReadyGamer AI.
AI / Full-Stack Senior Developer · Norg · Conversion Digital · Magnium
Prompt pipelines for 15+ clients, an AI Playground that drove 20%+ SaaS adoption, and production RAG on LangChain + PGVector.
- Led Philippines team expansion via PyCon recruitment
Founder & Full-Stack Dev · Solana projects — Solhack, solana.blog, Gamerplex
Built Solhack.com on a Solana Grant, grew it to 3.6K+ developers completing courses, and sold it to a training institution. Wrote 50+ articles at solana.blog. Founded Gamerplex; Pet Legends took a notable mention at Solana Grizzlython 2023.
- 3 Unity games shipped
- 4K+ social following
- Superteam Founders Trek, Dubai
Founder · Solana Australia (ANZ)
Founded and scaled the ANZ Solana developer community from zero — raised funding, ran national meetups with Superteam, delivered workshops and hackathons, mentored 2,000+ developers via Discord.
- 6K+ community following
Infrastructure Automation Lead · BHP
Led a team of 65+ infrastructure engineers, deploying and supporting automation at mining-industrial scale with Ansible and Python on NetDevOps practice.
Things I have personally built
MiroFish Research
41,962 views on the demoMy fork of the open-source MiroFish: a 10,000-agent prediction engine that runs a structured, multi-stage debate over macro events — oil, commodities, geopolitics — and shows its working. Feature-for-feature parity with a $50/mo terminal, running on hardware you own.
openmesh-cli
The `om` CLI: deploy, expose, observe and update a sovereign app on an Xnode with EVM wallet auth. The happy path is four commands.
Gamerplex & Contention Markets
11 programs, 170+ E2E testsOn-chain skill arcade and a game-agnostic pari-mutuel settlement protocol on Solana, with permissionless resolution and an open standard for permanent game history. Submitted to the Solana hackathons — Grizzlython and Colosseum Frontier.
Xnode TPM attestation
Remote attestation for sovereign compute: a seven-step quote / seal / unseal / credential-activation flow that proves a real app produced a real output on a real, unmodified machine.
Solhack
AcquiredA Solana developer learning platform built on a Solana Foundation grant, grown to 3.6K+ developers completing courses, then sold to a training institution.
deficompare
An open, fee-free DeFi comparison tool across chains and apps — my most-starred personal repo.
Liberati
Open-source sovereign AI stacks packaged so anyone can run them — local agent teams, research swarms and one-command installers, plus the community that ships them.
The numbers behind it
Built in public
Lost Colosseum Hackathon — Shipping to Solana Seeker Anyway
Losing a hackathon is not a reason to stop shipping. Sovereign game dev, continued.
100% Local AI Agent Research — No Middleman
A full research agent stack running on my own hardware, no API keys anywhere.
Predict Anything with 10,000+ Agents — MiroFish Demo
Ten thousand agents debating oil prices against real-world events. The channel’s most-watched build.
MiroFish Research Update — Deploy an Agent Swarm to Analyze Anything
Brief mode, markets view and the five-stage debate pipeline.
Free & Open Source Cursor Alternatives
VS Code + Continue + Ollama + Qwen2.5 Coder — the same workflow without the subscription.
Introducing Base Mini App Factory
The OpenX Network vibe-coding platform that went on to deploy 1,000+ mini apps.
Build with AI, Monetize with Web3 — Assumption College Workshop
One of the university workshops across Mindanao, ~150 students at a time.
Hack Node India — Winner Announcements
Judging and closing out an international hackathon cohort.
Geeks on a Beach Philippines — Open Source AI
Podcast conversation on why open-source AI matters outside the US tech bubble.
Kill Your AI Subscriptions — Run DeepSeek R1 Locally
The first of the sovereign-AI builds: replace the monthly bill with your own machine.
What I believe
Owning the box is the only durable edge
Models commoditise and prices collapse. What does not commoditise is control of the hardware the inference runs on. Everything else is rented.
If it needs someone else’s API key, it is not sovereign
A stack that breaks the moment a vendor changes a policy was never yours. I only ship things people can run without asking permission.
Your data and your history belong to you
Chat history, game history, research — the record of what you did should be portable and verifiable by anyone, not a hostage held to keep you subscribed.
Public goods compound
Open-license it, document it, teach it. The 3,000-person hackathon and the 1,000 deployed apps happened because the stack was open, not because it was guarded.
Everything else
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