the few wedding planners I've talked to are already slightly confused that I used ChatGPT to investigate venues before speaking to them and Blaine is now proposing that I bring an AI copy of his voice and personality to our calls so he doesn't have to attend “hi yes sorry my fiancé couldn’t make it but I do have his virtual duplicate here to weigh in”

I’ve been in an engineer in crypto for close to a decade and now I’m building a company in it. Today I watched @donnoh_eth discuss @staycloakedxyz on @ambire's livestream and it reminded me of something I’ve seen time and time again: crypto twitter has a strange tendency to reward cynicism. Someone builds something new and the instinct is to find the impurity, point out why it isn’t sufficiently decentralized/private/permissionless, and dunk on it. I think it’s one of the worst parts of the culture. There is enormous value in adversarial thinking. Crypto needs people who question assumptions, find weaknesses and hold projects accountable. But there’s a difference between adversarial thinking and ideological purity testing. Watching the discussion today, I felt like Cloaked became the latest example of it. We’re two engineers, totally self-funded, trying to solve a problem we’ve personally experienced for years: using crypto and maintaining onchain privacy without destroying UX is still far too complicated. We make deliberate engineering and UX tradeoffs to make that experience dramatically easier. You can disagree with those tradeoffs. You should criticize them. But dismissing pragmatic attempts to move the UX forward because they don’t pass your notion of purity is myopic and counterproductive. Crypto needs more builders talking to users, building for the world as it exists today, and being transparent about the tradeoffs they make. Then let users decide what’s worth using.

day 286 of building a startup with my partner - growth and marketing remain the hardest parts of being a founder for me. neither comes naturally, and I’m constantly pushing myself into uncomfortable territory trying to learn them. - evening walk in the woods in lieu of a workout today. - some of our early users are remarkably kind and willing to bear with us while we fix things. this still surprises me.

day 285 of building a startup with my partner - shipped a few things today: .gwei name resolution, a refresh prompt when the app is out of date after a deploy, and better support for native asset bridges - our whole day has shifted later to the point that we ate lunch at 2 pm. I’m not about it. either I force a very early bedtime or accept one brutal morning this week. - did not want to go to the gym today but went anyway

purchasing a .gwei domain using the browser extension @livia___22 and I have spent a long time working on. I’ve never liked moving a domain (.eth/.gwei) to my main Ethereum address because it basically means doxxing that address. this is a good example of “Hide My Address” (think Apple’s Hide My Email, but for crypto.) I created a fresh address, funded it privately from my @0xprivacypools balance, and used that instead.

your crypto balance is none of your clients’ business. every time you give a client your wallet address, you could be giving them access to your entire financial history. your balance, previous payments, what you hold, where you send it. Cloaked gives you a fresh address for every payment you receive. categorize the payment, then move it into your private balance. one wallet. thousands of fresh addresses. far less financial information leaked.

day 283 of building a startup with my partner - 5th week in a row of weekend 5k!! - Worked in the morning & was buzzing from caffeine + run. Took the afternoon off ... (couldn't convince Blaine to do that though) - Reading East of Eden

day 282 of building a startup with my partner - Blaine’s dev trap is UI tinkering; mine is performance tuning. I just really like sifting through logs. - a girl at the coffee shop we frequent took a photo of us on her disposable camera :) - not an original idea but THE hack is replacing algorithm-supplied dopamine (Instagram/X notifications) with better sources of dopamine (new activity in your beautiful company dashboard)

day 280 of building a startup with my partner - pulled together some metrics today and found that 73% of users who deposit into Cloaked go on to deposit again. once we get someone to try the app, they seem to like it. getting them to make that first deposit remains the hard part. - I still make Blaine pull over whenever we see cows, which means we pull over quite a lot - I have no idea how or when Codex resets usage limits, but mine seem to reset far more often than Blaine’s, much to his daily chagrin. I’ve been clinging to a one-time usage reset for weeks and still haven’t needed it

day 279 of building a startup with my partner - returned to diagramming today, something I haven’t done much since AI became such a big part of my workflow. it’s still the best way for me to fully grok a system, and now I can ask AI what my model is missing with a screenshot. - midday lunch outside because it was too lovely not to. - every time someone hits an issue in our app, I feel a pang of worry but I need to keep reminding myself each fix I do tightens the product.

day 278 of building a startup with my partner - tough day! feel like I went one step forward, two steps back with some of the pricing work I've been doing. Playing whack-a-mole with issues can be frustrating. - flat white & protein ball morning pictured - my hot take is that 5.6 on ultra/max is actually worse than high/extra-high because it tries harder but actually isn't smarter & takes itself down terribly deep rabbit holes you have to constantly yank it out of.

day 277 of building a startup with my partner - lots of work refining token discovery and pricing today. I've fallen into maintenance and performance work lately while Blaine drives new features forward. - the Irish eat their Sunday “dinner” at midday which to me feels like I'm having Thanksgiving every week - my dad has thrown his trusty bot at a first pass on wedding planning. I’m supportive of this hobby.

The more seriously you take onchain privacy, the more addresses you end up using. Eventually, the hard part becomes remembering what each one was for. Who did you share it with? What payment were you expecting? Why did you create it? Cloaked now lets you answer those questions upfront. Generate an address → tag it → share it. When funds arrive later, the context is already attached. Upgrade your wallet experience now:

day 276 of building a startup with my partner - Ok, I did work today, despite my earlier claim that I would protect weekends. But this was a weird week, so it’s fine. Blaine was all too happy to work today. - We had a promotion where depositing $5 on sign up got you seven days with no fees. I ripped it out. Turns out it was actually bootstrapping usage, so we’ll be turning it back on. - 5k parkrun this morning. Extremely humbling to have children born in probably 2019 run past you (pictured). Don’t worry, I passed one of them in the end. It was my best parkrun yet at ~26 minutes!

90 days ago, we launched Cloaked. since then, users have deposited more than $650,000. we’re closing in on $1m in total volume 🎉🍾 people clearly want privacy in their wallet, but they don’t want privacy to feel like a separate product.

day 275 of building a startup with my partner - chased down three separate issues with swaps on Robinhood Chain today. each one is minor, but together they make the whole swap experience rough. took up a big chunk of the day & will probably continue tomorrow - feeling a little blue now that my family has headed home! (picture of us on a 5k this past weekend) - back at the gym in earnest and really liking a ten-minute jog before lifting. feels fresh.

my fiancée and I are also co-founders. a while ago, we did a personality quiz together because we were curious if it could help us understand how we work, both personally and professionally. the interesting part wasn’t our similarities, but our differences. we’re both very high in openness and high in conscientiousness. the major divergence is neuroticism: hers is high, mine is relatively low. high neuroticism has costs, but it also increases vigilance. you detect threats, social tension and weak signals earlier. low neuroticism has costs too. you can underweight risks, but you’re better at remaining stable under uncertainty. I actually think the combination works quite well: she catches things I might miss. I’m less likely to overreact to the things she catches. maybe the better question isn’t “are we similar?” but “do our differences cancel out or compound?”

day 274 of building a startup with my… fiancé! - took a few days away after @blainemalone proposed and our families visited to celebrate. it’s been a lovely little whirlwind. - I’m very lucky to work every day with my best friend and partner. I really can’t imagine not working with Blaine at this point. building something together has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. - Cloaked kept chugging along smoothly without me, and I came back today to four features I’d left nearly ready to go. back to shipping!