“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Stepping Out the Door
Like many adventures, The Hobbit begins with a choice. Bilbo Baggins can either stay in the quiet comfort of The Shire, brewing tea, tending to his garden, and avoiding anything unexpected, or he can join a wizard and a band of dwarves on a quest no respectable hobbit would ever agree to. It’s the kind of choice that splits a life in two. One path offers the comforts of familiarity. The other is a hazy road that meanders towards places unknown. For Bilbo, the restless pull of adventure wins out. He steps onto the road.
In 2021, I made my own version of that choice. Not wizards, dwarves, or dragons, but cryptography, economics, and code, along with a conviction that these building blocks were coming together to reimagine the future of the internet. I joined Protocol Labs, and from that point on, my life’s trajectory changed.
Protocol Labs builds infrastructure for a more open and resilient internet. It launched Filecoin, a decentralized storage network designed to preserve human knowledge without relying on a central authority. It’s a bet that information should outlast institutions, backed by systems that are transparent, permissionless, and credible by design.
Exploring the Map
At Protocol Labs’ cryptoeconomics team, we designed incentive-aligned economies. We explored inflation schedules, reward distributions, auction designs, and governance rules. We modeled failure modes, evaluated edge cases, and stress-tested protocols under adversarial conditions. The focus was always the same: translating cryptoeconomic theory into systems designed for real-world complexity.
The work was rigorous and beautiful. At its best, it felt like applied philosophy grounded in math and game theory. We weren’t just asking what was optimal. We were asking what causes economies to fail and what keeps them stable. How do you build something that still works when no one is in charge? These questions still fascinate me.
At the same time, I was living out of a backpack. The blockchain industry is global, and I followed that current. After three years floating across South America, Europe, and Asia, the unfamiliar began to feel like home, with small communities, familiar faces, and steady patterns of life stitched across the map. I worked out of hostels, coffee shops, co-working spaces, and the homes of new friends. My world kept breaking and rebuilding as assumptions gave way to real context. Worldviews unraveled as I learned to listen more, map less, and bask in the privilege of simply paying attention to the unfamiliar. These experiences shaped me just as much as the work did. They reminded me that incentive structures and coordination mechanisms don’t exist in GitHub repositories or Jupyter notebooks. They exist in people, shared spaces, and communities.
By the end of 2024, I needed a pause. I still believed in decentralized systems and the value of credible neutrality, but the industry felt like it was drifting. The conversations I had always found most energizing, focused on designing durable mechanisms, navigating tough trade-offs, and building products meant for real people, had become harder to find. In their place came a kind of Keynesian beauty contest fueled by short attention cycles and manufactured hype. Too many projects were optimizing for token charts, and the space felt disconnected from the world it claimed to build for.
Markets have their rhythms, and hype undeniably plays a role in emerging tech, but I started to feel increasingly out of sync with the prevailing sentiments. The gap between the stories told and the systems built continued to grow. It wasn’t burnout exactly; it more felt like I had lost the thread.
Building What Matters
So, to begin 2025, I took a breather and stepped back without any plans for the next adventure.
I returned to places I missed and spent time with people I love. I wandered, skied, read, and explored without an agenda. I gave myself time to think and reflect on what had initially drawn me to the space. That’s when Glow came into view. I had met David, the founder, about a year prior and watched him present an earlier version of the idea. It stayed with me, and as our paths crossed again this year, I found myself drawn to the project's mission once more.
Glow starts with people and a simple premise. If you want to steer capitalism towards better outcomes, you don’t need to overhaul the system. You just need to tip the incentives towards the right outcomes.
That’s what Glow does. It makes solar energy more attractive to build, and it works not by imposing an ideology, but by creating economic structures that channel effort towards better outcomes. It is a carefully designed protocol that pays attention to who gets rewarded and why.
For most of my career, I’ve been working on systems that aim to align incentives, utilizing coordination mechanisms to steer behaviors. Glow does this too. But what excites me is what all of that machinery is pointed at. Glow makes solar energy viable in places where the market won’t do it alone. More importantly, it gives people a direct way to influence that market. Through Glow, individuals and communities can fund what they value. They just need conviction and willingness to participate.
This is what I’ve always believed crypto was capable of. Not just finance without banks, but action without gatekeepers, and the freedom to shape outcomes rather than just speculate on them.
Glow is built on the same primitives I’ve spent the last four years exploring: transparent incentives, programmable rewards, and collective governance. But it ties them to something tangible. Solar panels installed. Power on the grid. Cleaner air. A world you can see and feel.
I’ve been fortunate to spend time in many places over the past few years. Every place is different, and people show up for their communities in all kinds of ways, but one thing felt consistent. People care about what’s near, what they know, what they can influence, and what makes a difference in their lived experiences. Glow reflects that by creating the space for people to improve their slice of the world. We don’t need to save the planet all at once, but if enough people are empowered to act locally, the bigger picture starts to move.
That’s why I’m joining Glow, where I will continue to work on designing economies and shaping incentives to direct effort and funding towards what matters. Just as importantly, I’ll be learning from and building with the community, translating ideas into systems, and systems into real-world outcomes.
Glow is a network where we can shape the clean energy future that we believe in. It gives us the freedom to act and the responsibility that comes with it.
So here I am, stepping out the door again. No map. No wizard. Just conviction that the road will lead to places worth building.