A few years ago, I was working on backend systems for fintech products — payment APIs, transaction flows, and high-volume systems. I enjoyed the technical challenge, but something felt missing. Then during the 2021 DeFi summer, I came across projects like Uniswap and Yearn and was blown away. Not just by the tech — but by the fact that real financial infrastructure was being rebuilt from scratch, in the open, with code anyone could verify.
That transparency, autonomy, and permissionless nature completely shifted my perspective. I started writing Solidity smart contracts, testing them with Hardhat, and reading through exploit post-mortems just to understand how systems failed — and how to build them better. I even built internal tools to collect onchain data, simulate interactions, and audit internal DeFi protocols.
Since then, I’ve made it a goal not just to be a good backend engineer, but to understand how blockchain systems behave under pressure — from mempool activity to onchain event streams. It’s the intersection of finance, distributed systems, and security that really keeps me excited every day