Drawn always to where things are made.

Self-taught from age eleven. Born in Moscow, raised in the south of France, based in Toulouse. Across twenty years the work keeps bending toward the same place: not the surface, where things are used, but the layer beneath, where they are made. Consensus, protocols, the infrastructure power actually runs on.

The conviction underneath it is sovereignty. Self-custody, displacing the gatekeeper, handing power back to the person, a position held since the early Bitcoin days, and the reason the work has stayed in cryptography and decentralized systems rather than the layer above them. It is conviction held pragmatically: the same record runs through EU-compliant tokenization, KYC flows and audited contracts, built inside regulated systems, not against them.

A craftsman by temperament: zero-dependency, from-scratch, fast, security-conscious. The biggest wins came when a decisive operator owned the commercial front while the engineering was owned end to end, a pattern worth repeating on purpose.

The other half of the craft is human. Years of consulting built the muscle of making deep systems understandable to the people who fund, run and use them: the same protocol explained to investors and boards, to clients who had never held a private key, to conference halls at Money20/20. Underneath it sits a users'-advocate habit, being the user first and the engineer second, and letting that order decide the product.