About

Serial founder across e-commerce, gaming, and consumer internet — each chapter teaching a different lesson about what actually makes products work. Eventually the question that kept coming back was a harder one: why is moving money across borders still so broken?

That question led to co-founding UQPAY — a global payment infrastructure company focused on making cross-border transactions faster, cheaper, and more reliable. As Co-founder, CTO & CPO, I run both sides of the build: the job is to make the right calls on what to build and how to build it — and live with the consequences of both. Engineering is about managing complexity and maintaining optionality; product is about making bets on what the market actually needs. The two disciplines inform each other, or they don't work at all.

I don't separate "technical" from "product." The best infrastructure decisions are product decisions. The best product instincts come from understanding what's actually hard to build. Running both functions is a choice, not an accident.

AI Is Reorganizing the Work

Most AI discourse is either hype or backlash. The reality I'm living is more interesting: AI is not a productivity tool — it's a reorganization of how product development works. The boundary between "engineering" and "product" is collapsing. What a 10-person team can build is being renegotiated in real time.

For technical founders and engineering leads, this creates a specific kind of vertigo. The mental models for evaluating engineers, sizing teams, structuring roadmaps — all up for revision. I write about this not because I have clean answers, but because I'm navigating it with real stakes on the line. The writing is how I think out loud.

On Payments and the Infrastructure Layer

Payments looks solved from the outside. From the inside, the moment you cross a border — geographic, regulatory, or currency — the friction is brutal. Being based in Singapore puts you at the epicenter of that every day: capital flows, settlement corridors, regulatory frameworks — it's not theoretical here, it's live. That proximity keeps me honest about the gap between what payments should be and what it actually is.

An earlier chapter building deep in protocol and blockchain infrastructure turned out to be essential groundwork — shipping in adversarial, high-stakes environments teaches you to build defensively, move deliberately, and never assume the underlying rails are stable. That mindset is now baked into everything I design.

My thesis: programmable settlement infrastructure will redefine cross-border payments — not as a speculative bet, but as an engineering argument. The capability already exists. What remains is regulatory clarity, UX, and institutional trust. All three are in motion.

Find Me

I'm @0xmiikey on X. Thoughtful DMs get replies. Code is on GitHub. If you're building in payments, fintech infrastructure, or AI-augmented products, I'm always up for a good conversation.