CTO wants to give me funded seed stage equity for pre-seed unpaid work - I will not promote

Hey everyone, I’m a 28-year-old Systems Engineer and Security Researcher with 6 years of experience. My background is split as follows: 3 years as a Cyber Security Researcher at a major enterprise (focusing on open source tech research, os internals and runtime detection, not vulnerability research/bug hunting). 3 years of experience as a Systems/Infrastructure Engineer at a Series B startup, specializing in C/C++ development and backend infrastructure. 6 months as an early engineer (Employee #8) at a seed-