Sam Ragsdale

Sam Ragsdale is the founder and CEO of Merit Systems, a startup building payment and coordination infrastructure for open source software and the emerging agentic economy, backed by Blockchain Capital and a16z crypto. Before founding Merit, he was an engineer at a16z crypto, where he and Michael Zhu built the first implementations of Lasso and Jolt, the lookup-based SNARK and zkVM designs that pushed the state of the art in verifiable computing. Earlier in his career he worked at Blockchain Capital and as a software engineer at Google.

6 talks by Sam Ragsdale

• How agentic commerce works (and why it matters)
• How the x402 Standard Is Enabling AI Agents to Pay Each Other
• x402: The Key to Internet Money, Micropayments & The AI Agent Economy
• Theory to Code: Building the Breakthrough zkVM Jolt
• Lasso + Jolt: An engineering overview
• ZK10: Lasso: An Engineering Heavy Overview - Michael Zhu & Sam Ragsdale