I am 23, and for most of my adult life I have worked somewhere near the border between software, money, fintech, crypto and the strange machinery that connects all of them. I write mostly in Rust and TypeScript. Before Rust, I had worked with Go, Python, C++, C#, JavaScript. I cannot say that these languages are bad. Each of them taught me something. But Rust was the first language that felt not only powerful, but beautiful. Rust makes you slow down. It makes you investigate things you could ignore elsewhere. It demands more time, more attention and more powerful machine just to compile what you wrote. But in return, it gives you a rare feeling: that complexity can still be controlled.

I first read about Bitcoin in 2018, when I was sixteen. Back then, I did not see any real use case for it. I was not thinking about payments, international settlements or financial freedom. I was simply shocked by the idea itself. A system where ownership did not depend entirely on a bank. A ledger that could exist without one company controlling it. Money that could be moved by software. For several years, this remained only an interesting concept in my mind. Then, around 2022, crypto stopped being an abstract technology for me. I started using it while travelling, receiving payments and moving money between countries. I had never felt especially attached to traditional banking, but from that point it became clear that crypto could solve problems that banks either could not solve or did not want to solve. By 2025, all my bank accounts in my home country had been restricted or closed because of my connection to crypto. At that point, I had already lost much of my trust in the Russian banking system. Government anti-fraud initiatives were expanding quickly, but from the user’s perspective they often looked less like protection and more like a system where access to your own money could disappear without a clear explanation. So I gradually stopped treating a bank account as the safest place to store value. Most of my balance moved to blockchains. Not because I believe blockchains are magical or free from risk. They are not. Keys can be lost. Wallets can be drained. Funds can be marked as suspicious. Exchanges can block withdrawals. AML systems can turn supposedly fungible coins into assets with different histories and different levels of acceptability. But there is still one thing that feels fundamentally different: control.

In 2024, I lost my iPhone during a freeride session in Priiskovy. The phone disappeared somewhere in the snow, but my wallet did not disappear with it because I had backed up the recovery phrase. That experience made self-custody feel real to me. At the same time, I do not romanticize crypto. I have spent a lot of time working around exchanges, integrations, liquidity, automation, system architecture, refactoring, testing, debugging and all the endless decision-making that happens before something financial can work reliably. The closer you get to the industry, the harder it becomes to believe the stories it tells about itself. Perpetual futures, most NFTs and thousands of altcoins have very little to do with decentralization. Much of the market is simply gambling infrastructure built on top of an important technological idea. A token can call itself decentralized while its liquidity, infrastructure, development and narrative are controlled by a small group of people. A trader can believe they are competing in an open market while their position can be liquidated by volatility, leverage, thin order books or decisions made by centralized exchanges. Even prediction markets sometimes seem more honest to me than perpetual futures. At least the bet is visible. In leveraged markets, the game often pretends to be investing.

I do not believe that everything called crypto deserves to survive. I am interested in the part underneath the casino. I am interested in settlement. In ledgers. In ownership. In systems where two parties can agree that a transfer happened without maintaining ten separate databases and later spending weeks reconciling them. That is why I keep returning to Ethereum. Not because Ethereum is perfect. It is expensive, public, complicated and surrounded by its own industry of speculation. But the basic idea remains powerful: one shared ledger that different systems can use as a settlement layer. The next thing I want to build is a payment system that settles transactions on Ethereum. The reason is almost boring, and that is why I like it. Maintaining one verifiable ledger can be easier than maintaining many private ledgers that constantly disagree with one another. Of course, the real difficulty is not deploying a smart contract. The real difficulty begins when the system touches the outside world: banks, fiat currencies, stablecoins, liquidity providers, compliance, failed payments, refunds, exchange rates, privacy and accounting. That is the work I find interesting.

I do not see software as a collection of frameworks, languages or fashionable architectures. For me, software is a way to define who controls a system, who can change its rules, who can verify what happened and what remains when trust disappears. Maybe that is why I like Rust. And maybe that is why, despite everything wrong with the crypto industry, I still believe the original blockchain idea was worth being shocked by.