In the past 13 years, I did extensive cryptography research, developed a number of decentralized protocols at Chain/Interstellar, designed a breakthrough blockchain engine ZkVM, and spent years building products for real users.

For the last four years, together with the TON developer community and key ecosystem partners, I helped build the TON ecosystem. My team created Tonkeeper, TON Connect, the TON API developer platform, the industry’s first gasless infrastructure with W5 account abstraction, on-chain recurring subscriptions protocol, Tonkeeper Pro with best-in-class multisig support, an on-chain 2FA, a liquid staking protocol, and Tact language that opened door to next-gen development tooling.

I am very proud of the results of this journey. This was my first serious experience as a co-founder and CEO. I met incredible people, learned the hard way how to build teams and a business, made the mistakes one has to make, and grew as a person.

By the end of 2025, I had accomplished what I set out to do at TON and Tonkeeper, and it was time to move on to the next chapter.

Next chapter

Since the beginning of 2026 I and my team have started work towards the hardest problem in crypto: turning Bitcoin into actual money.

Bitcoin is the most secure monetary asset in crypto and constitutes solid 70% of the total market cap. Its strength comes from simplicity and restraint: Bitcoin is great store of value. Many failed attempts to fork, upgrade or otherwise mess with Bitcoin are a testament to that robustness. The few successful upgrades were obvious bug fixes and backwards-compatible improvements that took years to design and deploy.

But robustness alone is not enough. To become everyday money, Bitcoin needs to be more useful: fast payments, privacy, programmability, stable assets, richer accounts and better user experience. The rest of the crypto industry has explored many of these, but mostly across disconnected networks with painful tradeoffs in decentralization, security, monetary credibility, custody or user protection.

The industry remains stuck. Bitcoin has the strongest foundation, but limited everyday utility; newer networks offer useful capabilities, but too often as expert tools, trading venues or experimental playgrounds rather than solid money for everyone.

Problem 1: the crypto industry has a reputation of “99% casino and 1% weirdos”.

Problem 2: the improvements over Bitcoin are fragmented across local optima: they neither replace Bitcoin nor help it become better, more ubiquitous money.

What is needed is the transformation of store of value into currency. We need everyday money that is secure against confiscation, inflation, privacy violations and developers’ abuse. And we need to treat crypto as a tool for people to rely on in their daily lives with a peace of mind.

Safely: the self-custody wallet that cares

First, we start with the correct attitude. We must treat cryptocurrencies as a new reality and a very personal capital-preservation tool, not as a “platform” or “ecosystem” with activity in and of itself, turning the whole thing into an effective unregulated gambling arena. Crypto must solve real long-standing problems in the real world: keep and preserve value securely and help with transactions. Wallets and tools must be designed to serve their users, not to serve their creators at the expense of the users.

Towards that point we are building Safely: the self-custody wallet that cares. Safely stores your bitcoins and other cryptos in one easy to use app, organizes the wallets and accounts and makes all the boring and obvious things correctly and beautifully. Safely is solving the toxic nature of seed phrases with end-to-end sync between your personal devices. With Safely you no longer need to write down secret words that are impossible to remember and so easy to lose: the wallet keys always remain within the devices you own and trust. Safely respects your privacy, runs on open standards and open source code; protects you against supply chain attacks, censorship and vendor lock-in.

With Safely we bring back the long-forgotten tradition of marrying solid technology with liberal arts. We build a wallet for ourselves, our families and our colleagues. And we welcome everyone to join us.

Safely is launching in private beta in June 2026. Public release scheduled in September 2026.

Flame: the future of Bitcoin

Second, we are revisiting the original issue. Bitcoin is valuable because it’s robust, and because of that it can’t be made even more useful to make an even bigger impact. Altcoins cannot improve or steal Bitcoin’s value because they are designed to extract value from users towards promoters.

To solve this dilemma we are going to build Flame: the new kind of crypto-currency network that is built on top of Bitcoin and is designed to address most of Bitcoin’s shortcomings without compromising on security, decentralization or monetary value. Flame creates a new decentralized network with confidential transactions, scalable smart contracts, fast confirmation times and fair asset value and security derived from Bitcoin. Without pre-mine, without special privileges for miners, developers or validators. Flame is built with over a decade of experience in crypto-currency design with the aim to deliver a pervasive peer-to-peer electronic cash.

Flame is in the early development stage. The technology overview, whitepaper and the source code will be released soon. Launch is planned in October-December 2026.