I got into crypto in 2019. “Got into” is generous. What I actually did was watch Bitcoin. I didn’t buy anything, didn’t open an exchange account, didn’t pretend to understand what a hash was. I just watched the price move and read whatever turned up in front of me. Pure observation. The way you might watch a sport you don’t play.

I remember the feeling more than the details. It was the first time I’d encountered something that the people around me dismissed but the internet took seriously, and the gap between those two reactions was interesting to me. My friends would mention Bitcoin the way you mention a UFO sighting, half-joking, vaguely suspicious. Online, people were writing thousand-word essays about monetary policy. Someone was wrong, and I wanted to know who.

That was the whole of 2019 for me, crypto-wise. Curious, uninvolved, and quietly fascinated by the idea that a number on a screen could mean something to enough people that it kept going up.

Then 2021 happened.

2021 was the year I actually decided to learn. The bull market was loud, everyone had suddenly become an expert overnight, and I figured if this was going to keep being a thing, I should at least understand what the thing was. So I read. A lot. Whitepapers I didn’t understand. Reddit threads that contradicted each other. YouTube videos by men with too much confidence and too few credentials. Somewhere in the middle of all that reading, mid-2021, I came across a tweet from Cain about a 100-day eCash contest.

The premise was simple: build anything eCash-related. No rules, open playground. People were making artwork, websites, tools, anything they could think of. I clicked in expecting a fun way to make some money, which is, I’ll be honest, exactly what it was at first. But then I started actually reading about eCash, and that’s where things shifted.

eCash sent me down a rabbit hole I wasn’t expecting.

The first thing that broke my brain was Avalanche consensus. I’d been operating with a vague sense that “consensus” in crypto meant “everyone agrees somehow,” magic-hand-wave territory. Reading about how Avalanche actually works, with its repeated random sampling and probabilistic finality, was the first time I understood that the word “consensus” in this context was solving a real, genuinely hard engineering problem. Not a buzzword. A problem people had thought about for decades. I remember reading the same paragraph four times before something clicked, and when it did, it felt like seeing a magic trick from behind.

The Bitcoin Cash fork history was the next rabbit hole. If you’ve never sat with it properly, it’s one of the more genuinely interesting stories in crypto. A chain of philosophical disagreements, technical splits, ego clashes, and ideological civil wars that produced the project I was now reading about. eCash was downstream of decisions made by people who’d argued themselves into different rooms over the course of years. I read forum threads from 2017 like I was reading a history book.

And then supply mechanics, which sounds like the boring part until you realise it’s the entire economic foundation of whether a token is worth anything. Fixed supply, halvings, emission schedules, the relationship between scarcity and value. Once I understood that, I started seeing every other project through that lens.

What I didn’t notice while it was happening was that the eCash rabbit hole had turned into a crypto rabbit hole, and the crypto rabbit hole had turned into something else entirely. I’d stopped reading about eCash and started reading about how anything on the internet works. Why does my browser trust some certificates and not others. How does a server actually serve. What is a database, really. I was supposed to be researching a token and instead I was teaching myself the shape of computing.

And somewhere in there, something happened that I didn’t see coming.

I got interested in building.

Not trading. Building. The protocols, the infrastructure, the way pieces fit together, that’s what grabbed me. I had a laptop and an interest and zero coding background, which in retrospect is a hilariously bad starting position. But I started anyway. Self-taught, googling everything, breaking things, fixing them slowly. The first time I got a script to run end to end, it printed something stupid, and I sat there looking at it for longer than I’d like to admit. It was probably “hello world.” It felt like more than that.

I made two things for eCash during that contest period. A bot, which was basically a handy guide. Think of it as ChatGPT but for eCash, before ChatGPT existed in the form we know now. And a website that was meant to be a space for the community. Neither was sophisticated. Both worked. I was anonymous then, and I’m still anonymous now, so I won’t pretend either project was significant. But they were mine, and they were the first time I’d built something that existed on the internet because I made it exist.

That was the moment crypto stopped being a market for me and started being a craft.

And then I had to stop.

In late 2021, around December, I got into med school. I knew from day one that med school was going to need everything I had. This wasn’t something I figured out halfway through and got disillusioned by. I knew before I started. Medicine doesn’t share well with other obsessions, and I had two obsessions trying to claim the same hours. One of them had to wait.

I want to be honest about what that felt like, because I don’t think I was honest about it at the time. I’d just found the thing. I’d been looking for it without knowing I was looking, and I’d found it, and now I was about to walk away from it for what I assumed would be years. There’s a particular grief to that, to closing the laptop on something you’ve just fallen in love with because the timing is wrong. Not loud grief. Quiet grief. The kind you don’t post about because it sounds dramatic when you say it out loud. I cleared my desktop, archived the projects, and got on with anatomy.

So I took a break. A long one. I’d love to say it was a clean break but it wasn’t. I tinkered. Quietly, occasionally, never seriously. Mostly I just watched. I tracked the projects I cared about, eCash being the main one, and I stayed in my wallets but out of the conversation. I went from being someone trying to build to someone reading other people’s commits from the sidelines.

The break lasted years. Med school is its own world and once you’re in it, the version of you that existed before starts to feel like a different person. I didn’t miss crypto in any active way. I just knew it was still there, and I was still there, and at some point those two facts would line up again.

What pulled me back, of all things, was a memecoin post.

I saw something on my timeline earlier this year about Solana memecoins and I genuinely giggled. The last time I’d paid serious attention to memecoins was Shiba and Doge, the original wave, when “meme coin” still felt like a joke being told by a few people. The idea that crypto had now diversified to the point where memecoins were their own entire category, with their own infrastructure, their own platforms, their own culture, was funny to me. Funny in a “the world moved without me” way.

So I looked into it. And then I kept looking. Solana itself was the surprise. I remembered Solana from 2021, when it was one of the loud ones, and I remembered the fall. The outages, the FTX collateral damage, the obituaries. The fact that it had clawed its way back to actually mattering again was the thing that made me do real research. Comebacks are interesting. They tell you something about the underlying thing.

I didn’t come back to crypto by coming back to eCash, which might sound strange given everything I just wrote. But eCash was never a project I needed to “return” to. It was always the project that holds a place in my heart. The one I watch quietly, hold in my wallets, and find genuinely interesting from the sidelines. Solana was the comeback. eCash was the constant.

These days I’m building again. I built Yex, which integrated a simulation game that uses real tokens for trading. A thing that lets you play with crypto mechanics in a way that’s closer to the real experience than most paper-trading tools. And now I’m building Lumen Layer, which is my own attempt at crypto infrastructure on Solana. Both projects are tied to my handle, which is still anonymous, because some habits don’t change.

And yes, I’m back into eCash. Holding. Watching. Not nearly as socially invested as I was in 2021, but that’s less about eCash and more about who I’ve become.

The version of me that did the 100-day contest was online all day, refreshing the same handful of accounts, replying to everything, being early to every thread. I had the energy of someone who’d just discovered a new world and wanted to live in every corner of it at once. I don’t run on that engine anymore. Some of that is med school recalibrating my sense of what a productive hour looks like. Some of it is just age. Most of it is that I’d rather build for a few hours than be visible for the same number of hours, and you can’t really do both well.

So I’m quieter now. I read more than I post. I lurk in the projects I love and only surface when I have something worth saying. The accounts I follow have changed, the timing has changed, the energy has changed. But the underlying thing, the thing that started in mid-2021 when a tweet from Cain pulled me into a contest I clicked on for the wrong reasons, that’s the same.

If you’d asked me in 2019 what crypto was going to do to my life, I would have said it was going to be a hobby I read about. If you’d asked me in 2021, I would have said it was going to be a side project. If you ask me now, I’d say it was the door.

Crypto didn’t make me a trader. It made me a builder. It taught me to read documentation, to break things on purpose, to sit with code I didn’t understand until I did. The first protocol I ever genuinely fell in love with was eCash, and the first thing I ever built was for it, and the reason I’m building anything at all today is that a tweet from Cain in mid-2021 sent me into a rabbit hole I never fully climbed out of.

My journey into crypto was my journey into coding.

Quietly, as usual.

My Crypto Origin Story: The Door I Didn’t Know I Was Opening