Turning onchain settlement into real-world adoption. Product & Growth @ORBT_protocol
Joined October 2013
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Excited to share that I’m beginning a new chapter with @ORBT_Protocol as the VP of Product & Growth.
This role aligns deeply with how I think about infrastructure, scale, and long-term value creation.
In my new role, I’m looking forward to contributing with clarity and intention.
It’s a big shift, but the mission remains the same: building and scaling systems that leave a lasting impact on global payments infra.
Mrudul Chauhan retweeted
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
CoW changed how solvers get paid in Dec 2025.
395 days on: nobody left, execution quality flat, and the top solver went from 29.6% to 39.5% of volume.
By trade count, concentration actually fell.
The value moved. The transactions did not.
over 30% of hyperliquid's users now come from frontends other than the main app. and that share is still climbing.
this is the most bullish chart in crypto right now and almost nobody is talking about it.
it means the protocol became infrastructure. the liquidity is the moat, the UI is a commodity, and anyone can build distribution on top without asking permission.
the teams that understand this are building businesses. the ones that don't are still trying to bootstrap their own liquidity from zero.
global capital flows are about to experience a seismic shift
for forty years money moved through correspondent banks, SWIFT messages, and 2-3 day settlement windows.
that entire architecture is being replaced by intent-based rails
- users sign what they want. solvers compete to fill it.
- the rails work across chains and currencies
- doordash payouts, stripe routing, onchain repo, they’ll all be running on the same primitive
intent is quietly becoming the default unit of global payments.
defi on ethereum just absorbed a $292M exploit, a contagion cascade through aave, and a weekend run on TVL.
and it's recovering. quietly. without a bailout, without an emergency intervention, without any of the centralized levers tradfi would have pulled.
the part nobody is saying out loud: this is what a real stress test passing looks like. not zero damage.
controlled damage with a working recovery loop
most legacy financial infrastructure has never been tested like this and never will be.
and we just learned more about DeFi's actual resilience in 72 hours than we did in the previous 3 years.
tokenization projections for 2030 are still wildly underestimating this
even the bull case puts under 5% of global assets onchain. the real story isn't the number
it's what gets rebuilt to make that number possible:
- 2-day settlement turns into minutes
- 5-party custody chains collapse to one
- secondary markets that didn't exist start clearing 24/7
Building the infra underneath is where the real opportunity lies.
and the ecosystem is only as valuable as how easy you make it to ship on it.
every chain claims it wants more builders. then ships a developer experience that takes a week to set up throughput, TPS, finality.
none of that matters if the median builder gives up on day two.
there are entire categories of web2 apps that would obviously be better onchain and almost nobody is building them:
- a spotify where every stream pays the artist per second
- a patreon where subscriptions are programmable.
- a kickstarter where funds release in milestones voted by backers.
Instead of being crypto versions of a product, they're just better products that happen to use onchain rails.
who's building these?
doordash is paying drivers in stablecoins through tempo.
im bullish on this because this is how crypto proliferation actually starts.
dashers in colombia wont have to wait for 3 days for $40, and can instead expect instant payouts.
can’t wait to see which companies deploy this next.
every team i talk to is shipping faster than they're talking to users.
we've all done it.
you ship something you were sure people wanted, watch the usage chart stay flat, and then realize the actual problem was three layers deeper than what you built for.
the cheapest thing in product development right now is one honest conversation with someone using your protocol. and almost nobody is having it.
while everyone was panicking about the weekend, RWA tvl quietly ticked up to $27.6B. 4% gain on a red week.
the institutional capital also seems to be landing in the same direction:
- ondo, clearstream, and 360x signed a deal to put tokenized us stocks on a regulated european venue
- singapore's ocbc launched southeast asia's first onchain gold fund this week
- blackrock, apollo, deutsche börse all making moves in the same window
interestingly, even though retail lost faith and started pulling money out of defi after the last two hacks, the institutions just kept building positions.
tempo shipped passkey wallets recently for its users.
that’s a very subtle yet meaningful shift because:
- onboarding goes from a 15-step tutorial to a biometric scan.
- audience for every DeFi product gets wider overnight
- the wallet UX gap has been crypto's biggest bottleneck for years. this is the first time it feels like it's actually closing
this will never trend but matters more than most things that will.
here's one under-discussed thing from this weekend:
a lot of teams park meaningful treasury in aave for yield, which means right now that capital is either stuck or moving slowly.
that implies runway just got compressed for teams that had nothing to do with any of it.
most treasury frameworks treat "DeFi yield" as one bucket. one protocol hits a snag and your operating cash is suddenly harder to reach for a week.
after years of getting burnt, the lesson remains the same: optimizing for an extra 1% only looks smart until the day you actually need the money.
liquidity can make or break your project, which is why you can never optimize it’s allocation enough.
. @AnthropicAI's unreleased model Mythos found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD for $50. flagged weaknesses in TLS and SSH too.
these are the crypto libraries most of DeFi runs on. and $200B in smart contracts are sitting in public codebases, fully readable.
we spent years getting good at auditing solidity. and the attack surface moved to everything around it and nobody updated the scope.
"audited" hasn't meant "safe" for a while now, making this gap impossible to ignore.
the smartest builders i know aren't building for "crypto users" anymore.
they're building for people who will never know they're using crypto. payroll products, treasury tools, cross-border settlement, card programs backed by stablecoin rails.
and honestly that shift feels right. the best infrastructure disappears into the product.
but i think something gets lost when every serious team optimizes for invisibility. the weird experimental stuff, the things that only make sense onchain, the products that couldn't exist without programmable money, those are getting starved of talent
the teams still building things that only work because of crypto, not despite it, are the ones i'm watching closest right now.
recently realized that the best DeFi products right now don't feel like DeFi at all
- phantom is basically a neobank.
- hyperliquid feels like binance.
- bridge cards just work at any visa terminal
the infra got good enough that the frontend can finally hide it. and that's not a small thing, it took years of grinding on gas abstraction, chain routing, and wallet UX that nobody wanted to fund.
the teams still building for people who understand gas fees are building for a shrinking audience.
absolutely love mert’s view here.
every serious builder i talk to is heads down on efficient finance because that's where the revenue is.
but the best products from every past cycle were things nobody asked for. and the tools to build those things just got massively better and cheaper.
that gap doesn't stay open forever.
