November 2021, that’s when I officially stepped into the Web3 world.
My focus was clear: self-custody, DeFi, and building trustless systems. It’s been a four-year journey since, filled with countless experiments, highs and lows, and lessons I couldn’t have learned anywhere else.
What’s kept me here all along is the ethos! The idea that individuals should own their money, data, and choices. Having seen the realities of money, politics, and running a business firsthand, this belief resonated deeply. It was strong enough for me to walk away from a profitable company doing millions in revenue, to pursue something that felt true.
As a computer science graduate, data systems have always been my thing. I see problems through the lens of technology. That fascination, combined with the socio-economic constraints of my upbringing, is what makes me so drawn to Bitcoin and blockchain tech in the first place.
I’ve learned my Bitcoin-first lesson the hard way.
Burning my hands with the wrong people, wrong incentives, and wrong projects in the broader Web3 world or as Bitcoiners would say, with shitcoiners.
In early 2024, I decided to go all in on Bitcoin.
That shift was the most defining decision of my career.
Back then, I still believed in the potential of building wide, a “Bitcoin ecosystem” with layers, bridges, and sidechains. Surge started as critical infrastructure to nurture that innovation. We even called it the “Meta Layer,” designed to help Bitcoin L2s scale and interconnect.
But time, experience, and thousands of hours building that infrastructure gave me something more valuable than success: clarity.
I saw up close what was real, and what wasn’t.
The idea that Bitcoin adoption needed “L2s” and heavy infra turned out to be, in many ways, a mirage, a developer’s illusion that tech can fix trust.
I wrote about this shift in my post “RIP Bitcoin L2s,” where I called time on that entire narrative.
By mid this year, I was clear on one thing:
Bitcoin doesn’t need another scaling gimmick. It needs financial primitives that align with its ethos, open, transparent, non-custodial.
That’s why I started Meta Bitcoiner to document my learnings from the trenches. I wrote about topics like BitVM and MPCs, which are still highly relevant to Bitcoin’s on chain economy evolution.
The question that now drives me is simple:
What’s possible on Bitcoin, directly on-chain?
Not “Bitcoin + L2.”
Not “Bitcoin via wrapped assets.”
But On-Chain Bitcoin.
OnChain Bitcoin is a continuation of that journey, a new home for everything I write, research, and build around transparent Bitcoin-native finance.
This Substack will explore how real financial primitives: custody, lending, stablecoins, and more, can be built on-chain, with Bitcoin as the foundation.
No wrapping. No rehypothecation. No trust games.
Every week, I’ll share my learnings from building and researching this frontier: the technologies, protocols, and people pushing the on-chain Bitcoin movement forward.
My readers so far have been friends, builders, and Bitcoiners who’ve followed my work closely. As I narrow focus to on-chain Bitcoin, I want this space to serve a more specific audience, including myself 😀.
I’m deeply committed to pushing this movement forward and helping bring the next generation of financial primitives on-chain Bitcoin.
If this resonates, if you care about bringing Bitcoin’s ethos back to finance, subscribe and join me on this next chapter.
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