Why I Started Writing: A Note on 0xMiikey
Seven years of building payment infrastructure, crypto protocols, and AI products. Here is why I finally started writing it down.
I’ve been building in the intersection of fintech, crypto, and AI for seven years. For most of that time, I didn’t write publicly. The reasons were the usual ones: too busy, the thoughts weren’t ready, someone else had already said it better.
None of those reasons were good enough.
Writing forces you to know what you actually think — and who you want to think alongside
Why Now
The honest answer: the pace of change in our space has gotten fast enough that I want a record of how I was thinking at each moment.
In 2019 I wrote internally about why stablecoin settlement rails would matter for cross-border payments. In 2021 I wrote about DeFi infrastructure surviving the speculative mania. In 2022 I had views about FTX and what custodial trust actually requires. In 2023 I had early takes on LLMs in production financial applications.
Some of those views were right. Some were wrong. All of them were formed in real context, with real stakes, at a moment in time when the outcome wasn’t obvious.
That’s the kind of writing I want to do. Not the hindsight-obvious retrospective. The in-the-moment, this-is-what-I’m-seeing, here-is-my-reasoning kind.
The most valuable writing isn’t the hindsight-obvious retrospective — it’s the in-the-moment record: this is what I’m seeing, here is my reasoning, and the outcome isn’t obvious yet. That’s the only kind worth doing.
What This Is Not
This isn’t a newsletter about crypto prices or AI model benchmarks. There are better places for that.
It’s not a personal brand exercise. I’m not trying to become an “influencer” in the fintech or crypto space.
It’s a working document. A record of how I think about building payment infrastructure, managing engineering teams through volatile markets, navigating the intersection of crypto-native and traditional financial systems, and deploying AI in contexts where being wrong is expensive.
What I’m Working On
Currently focused on:
- Scaling cross-border stablecoin settlement infrastructure
- MPC-based custody for institutional payment operations
- AI-driven payment routing and risk decisioning
- Team and organizational design as AI changes what “engineering” means
These are the problems I think about every day. The writing will reflect that.
Stablecoin settlement, MPC custody, AI-driven routing — the problems I think about every day
The Handle
0xMiikey. The 0x prefix is the Ethereum convention for hexadecimal values — it’s how addresses, transaction hashes, and raw data are represented on-chain. It’s also how I think about the intersection I operate in: one foot in the cryptographic, one foot in the financial.
It felt right.
If you’re building in payments, crypto infrastructure, or AI-augmented products — I’d like to know what you’re seeing. The most useful thing writing does is create the conditions for good conversations.
See you in the next post.