Before I begin, I would like to point out that Tobi forced me to do this! I am writing about myself against my own will. Here goes nothing.
The Beginning
This story starts on September 2018. I had just arrived in Australia, and I clearly needed to find a job. About a year prior I had finished my undergrad in Maths and Computer Science in Spain, where I'm originally from. My first interview is hard to forget: they were allegedly looking for a programmer, but as soon as I got there they locked me up in a tiny room to do QA testing on a fake mobile app. I left as fast as I could, bracing myself for more awful job interviews. But, a few days later, I met Philipp.
To be completely honest, I didn't know anything about Bitcoin just a day before the interview. I had spent 2 months straight poring over a Haskell book. Haskell is a niche programming language, for those who don't know. Haskell jobs aren't really a thing, but these guys were working with Rust. That was almost cooler. To make up for the gap in my knowledge regarding Bitcoin, I just watched a YouTube video the night before. Shoutouts to 3Blue1Brown!
It's safe to say that the interview went well because I'm still "here", 7 years later. Things have obviously changed a lot since then, but all the iterations of the company have had one thing in common: a great team. That's what drew me in all those years ago. I was so eager to learn from them, and there was so much to cover: software engineering, Rust, Bitcoin, cryptography. And, to this day, I'm still learning.
Connect All The Blockchains
Seven years give you a chance to work on a lot of different things. When I first joined, we were leading the way in cross-blockchain research. We even came up with a slogan: "Connect all the blockchains, without adding yet another one". It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it was true. We pioneered atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2018, and we went even further and swapped Lightning for ERC20 tokens just a few months later.
Privacy Coins
Fast-forward to 2020 and I get assigned a really cool project. For the longest time we have been talking about privacy coins internally, but this is the first time we get our hands dirty: Bitcoin atomic swaps with privacy-focused cryptocurrencies. These coins use a lot of interesting cryptography: Pedersen commitments, range-proofs, signature aggregation. With the invaluable help of an ex-colleague, we navigated all this complexity and came up with a protocol, which I then got the chance to implement. And it worked! But my main takeaway was that I really wanted to keep doing this kind of work. I wanted to do all things cryptography.
I didn't have to wait long to get another chance at something truly challenging. Later that year, we set our sights on Monero, a whole different beast. Bitcoin-Monero atomic swaps had already been invented by another researcher, but we wanted to be the first to build a tool that people could actually use. And we did just that (in fact, people are still using it to this day!). With that out of the way, we then designed a whole new protocol to swap in the opposite direction, with Monero moving first. This was, undoubtedly, the hardest thing I've ever worked on (what the hell is an adaptor ring signature?!). We were so close to the finish line when we discovered that we needed small changes to Monero's base layer for it to work, and it wasn't happening. That one still stings.
ItchySats and DLCs
In 2021 we branched out to focus on something different. We felt like we had done everything that we could possibly do in the cross-blockchain research space, and we got the itch to start building actual user-facing products for bitcoiners. Specifically, we noticed the popularity of perpetuals (or CFDs) on platforms such as BitMEX, and we thought it our duty to build a self-custodial equivalent, using Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs). Our first stab at it was ItchySats (the best name we've ever come up with). ItchySats was built with the self-sovereign bitcoiner in mind. It was available on platforms like Umbrel and RaspiBlitz, where we were able to foster a small but very dedicated community.
With the experience of ItchySats under our belts, we had quickly become experts in the space of DLCs. We were even able to devise and implement an extension of the original protocol, to make quick updates to the state of the contract: DLC channels. It was this new protocol that eventually led us to our next venture: 10101. (It's ten-ten-one, not one-oh-one-oh-one). In 2023, we flew the entire team to New York City to join the first cohort of the Wolf accelerator program. An intense 8 weeks which were capped off with us winning a substantial monetary prize on pitch day.
The Road to Lendasat
Despite our early success with 10101, we made the difficult decision to shut it down by the end of 2024. It was the first time that we had seriously embraced building something really ambitious, and it was sobering to experience what it was like to have to let go.
Luckily, we were able to bounce back into what you can probably already guess: Lendasat. Lendasat's story is still in the making, so I will stop here, before I run out of characters.
Lucas