Software engineer and researcher passionate about distributed systems, blockchain technology, and open-source development.
My love of technology started with Lego Mindstorms and robotics competitions. That curiosity evolved into a passion for electronics and eventually programming, which led me to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley — with a minor in political economy to feed my parallel obsession with history, systems, and the social sciences.
In Fall 2015, I joined the Bitcoin Association of Berkeley, a tiny student club that changed my life. What started as a libertarian-leaning interest in sound money became something deeper, a way to merge my technical and political interests, and more importantly, a gateway into an incredible community. The next year, I co-created and taught the university’s first cryptocurrency course. Its success inspired us to found Blockchain at Berkeley, which quickly became one of the largest and most respected student blockchain organizations in the world.
I’ve always loved exploring alternative ways of organizing people — not just in theory, but in practice. While at Berkeley, I ran for student government under a newly-formed Pirate Party — a playful experiment in memetic politics and participatory governance — and won a seat. I also taught a course on Swiss federalism, just because I was curious. That love of teaching still shows up in my life today through public talks, podcast interviews, and open-source education.
In 2017, while interning at ConsenSys, I became fascinated by Proof of Stake — which led me to Tendermint and its grander vision: Cosmos. Their modular, appchain-oriented roadmap made a lot of sense to me, and in all honesty, I preferred their higher levels of respect for Bitcoin than in Ethereum circles (I was and still am pretty Bitcoin maxi!). I quiet quit my ConsenSys internship early and joined the Cosmos team (All in Bits) as one of the first ten employees. By fall, I’d dropped out of college to work on Cosmos full time.
I spent the next few years helping build and launch the Cosmos Hub — doing everything from developer relations and evanagelism to software development and protocol design. During this time, I also co-founded Sikka, a validator infrastructure company, with my friend and colleague, Dev Ojha, to help support and secure the growing Cosmos ecosystem.
As Cosmos grew, I found myself increasingly focused on communicating complex ideas and connecting with builders across the space, becoming one of the main faces of the project. Around the same time, I became a co-host of Epicenter, one of the longest-running crypto podcasts, where I interviewed technologists, founders, and researchers building the future of decentralized systems.
After the Cosmos Hub launched in 2019, internal tensions and mismanagement led to the collapse of the company in early 2020 (long story that deserves its own post one day), and I moved on.
2020 was a year of exploration. I hacked on early AI agents with GPT-2, played with decentralized learning ideas, and dove into MEV research with my friend Tina — work that eventually inspired Flashbots.
Eventually, Dev Ojha and I decided that we wanted to tackle privacy — a missing pillar in crypto — together and began developing a system called Threshold Description to address MEV at the consensus layer. Around that time, Josh Lee and Tony Yun (creators of Keplr) had built a Cosmos SDK DEX as a hackathon MVP. We initially met to explore collaboration, where they may be our first customer — but quickly realized we should just build together.
And so Osmosis was born.
We launched in June 2021, leading Cosmos’ explosive growth, riding the waves of Terra mania (and its eventual collapse), and generally experiencing the many highs and lows of crpyto cycles. Along the way, we pioneered innovations in MEV resistance, DeFi primitives, and account abstraction. In 2025, we launched Polaris — a token portal for all of crypto, expanding beyond Cosmos to bring our UX and coordination stack to the broader ecosystem.
At the core of all my work is a desire to design better systems for coordination. I study how humans (and agents) align, remember, and decide — through history, political economy, and technology — and then build tools that support agency, sovereignty, and networked cooperation.
I’m especially interested in:
I try to embody the same principles I build for: sovereignty, freedom, and playful exploration. My real-world adventures — flying planes, tracing rivers, diving reefs — are physical extensions of my digital ideals. I’m currently working on quests like visiting every U.S. National Park, earning my pilot’s license, and learning to bluewater sail. Check out my adventures page to learn more.
This site is my personal lab notebook, mythic résumé, and coordination portal. If you’re curious what I’m up to, check out my now page.
The best way to reach me is through Twitter or GitHub. I’m always interested in discussing technology, collaboration opportunities, or interesting projects.