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As 2024 draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on a year of growth, challenges, and accomplishments. Time seems to have flown by — much like the eight years I’ve spent in this dynamic industry and my two years with Emblem. It feels surreal to think back to discovering r/ethereumproject through r/wallstreetbets in 2016. That moment seems both like yesterday and an entire lifetime ago.
From my perspective, the crypto industry has evolved dramatically. What started as a small, cult-like community of libertarian freedom fighters has transformed into a sprawling landscape dominated by agentic Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). In what feels like the blink of an eye, Bitcoin became a $2 trillion asset, even catching the attention of the United States Strategic Reserve.
The first four years of my crypto journey mirrored the experience of many newcomers: trading shitcoins, diving into the tech, and figuring out where I fit in this vast ecosystem. My breakout moment came in 2021 when I discovered Historical NFTs (HNFTs) and carved out a niche as a voice of reason within this nascent but deeply tribal community. Looking back, selling MoonCats at Sotheby’s Auction House in late 2021 was a pivotal moment. It marked my transition from an anonymous crypto enthusiast to an emerging figure in the space.
In 2022, I encountered Emblem Vault under the initial premise of building a Historical NFT marketplace. Together with fellow HNFT leader Adam McBride, I embarked on what started as a collaborative project but quickly revealed itself as something far greater. Rather than simply hiring Emblem to bring our vision to life, we joined forces with them — and soon discovered that Emblem Vault had the potential to become more than just a hub for cross-chain trading. It could serve as a foundational pillar of the ownership economy.
After six years as a full-time degen, I swapped my cleats for steel-toed boots and stepped into the builder’s trenches. Last year, 2023, was a transformative period of growth for me. I detailed those experiences in my 2023 Year in Review, sharing how they fundamentally reshaped my understanding of how this industry operates.
This year, however, feels different. It marks the culmination of years of learning, studying, and evolving into actionable leadership. 2024 wasn’t just about understanding the space — it was about stepping up and leading with purpose.
Last year, I took the opportunity to review some of Emblem’s accomplishments and provided context around those milestones (as detailed in the link above). This time, however, I want to lean more into the subjective lens of my personal journey, leaving the objective milestones to the official @emblemvault account. You can read their comprehensive 2024 Year in Review HERE.
For me, 2024 was defined by accomplishments, lessons, and milestones — all from the perspective of stepping through the looking glass.
• In February, I landed my first advisory role.
• By April, I participated in my first angel investment round.
• And in May, I stepped into my first CEO position.
The first half of 2024 solidified my position in the industry as someone who is here for the long haul. Each of these accomplishments represented earned milestones that should never be taken for granted. If you do, you risk falling into the trap of the KOL label, which often leads to the darkest depths of unsustainable credibility. Instead, by seeking authenticity, opportunities have a way of finding you.
The second half of the year marked my first session in the pilot’s cabin. While my promotion to CEO was months in the making, the true gravity of the role only set in once it was publicly recognized. As a leader, your responsibility extends beyond internal operations — you must also uphold accountability externally. The duality of the role is both challenging and rewarding, and I’ve come to embrace it fully.
Before diving deeper into the latter half of 2024, I want to share a few of my favorite essays and thought pieces from this year. I’ve always believed that open-sourcing ideas is a virtue and that writing serves as both an escape and a tool for connection. Combining the two allows others to engage with your vision and expectations of where the future might lead.
Here are a few of my favorites from 2024:
As I continue to reflect on this incredible year, I’m reminded of the importance of both growth and grounding. Milestones are worth celebrating, but they are also stepping stones toward bigger challenges ahead.
Let’s start with the biggest elephant in the room. As interest peaks, attention wanes quickly, and comprehension can be limited, it’s important to break this down clearly. The Expansion Campaign’s goals are ambitious — boldly so — which can make the initiative seem overwhelming to an outside observer when presented in full.
In simple terms, our mission is to push NFT interoperability to the next level of innovation. The ability to move any NFT from any blockchain to any blockchain is something only Emblem Vault is capable of in today’s environment. While competitors may emerge, the knowledge, network, and skill required to achieve this narrows the field drastically. This leaves just a handful of players with the capability to execute on this vision.
As part of our mission to establish Emblem as the cornerstone of crypto interoperability, we are introducing a token: Emblem Vault $KEYS. This token serves as the foundation for multiple incentivized programs where users can earn, purchase, or be rewarded KEYS, leading up to the Token Generation Event (TGE) scheduled for late Q3 and Q4 of 2025. Each KEYS initiative — be it the Vaulting Program, Founder Vaults, or airdrops — comes with its own set of rules and is amplified by carefully designed incentives and tokenomics.
What we announced on December 5, 2024, represents nearly a year of effort and thousands of hours of work. Personally, I’ve dedicated over 1,000 hours to this initiative, alongside the relentless contributions of our team. We are deeply committed to executing this vision. Without venture capital funding, we’ve had to rely on creativity and community engagement to drive this forward. Grassroots movements are the hardest to solidify, but once they take root, they are nearly impossible to dismantle.
We know where this is headed. I know where this is headed. The community knows where this is headed. Through sheer will, determination, and grit, we will see this through — or we will die on this hill.
The creation of the Founder Vault Program (under the Expansion Campaign) and the remaining initiatives in the campaign were shaped by the outcomes of what I’m about to share. Fundraising is a 24/7 job, and I now fully understand why founders often despise it. There’s no single, definitive way to approach it — no matter how much advice you get or who it comes from.
The experience feels like running blindfolded into a dark cave, chasing the promise of a treasure chest full of gold. But halfway through, after falling a million times and scraping your knees bloody, breaking your nose against unseen walls, and bats shit smeared down your back, someone informs you that the treasure chest may have a lock — and they don’t have the key.
You have to be confident enough to believe there’s a way forward but humble enough to accept that you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s a malleable process that requires following leads while staying curious enough to explore the uncharted. There is no single, foolproof way to navigate it, and you have to make peace with looking foolish and wasting time on countless dead ends.
Over the past year, I spoke with traditional VCs, crypto VCs, ecosystem VCs, hedge funds, investment DAOs, trading groups, NFT communities, angel investors, influencers, KOLs, retail traders, memecoin traders, small funds, and large funds. Every one of these groups — and there are more — had a different opinion of what I was presenting. Most of them wanted the best deal possible for themselves, often at the expense of the project.
I created more pitch decks than I’d like to admit and revised those same ones more times than I care to share. I cold-DMed nearly 1,000 people — so many, in fact, that Twitter temporarily locked me out for sending too many messages in a short period. And these weren’t just copy-paste messages; I quickly learned that personalization is key. Chain cold pitches don’t work — you have to make it personal.
Eating dirt through this grueling process was, surprisingly, the most rewarding experience of the year. It taught me a lot about how the industry operates, how different groups think, and how much noise exists in the space. Many people are wildly different in public compared to private conversations — some for better, others for worse.
Ultimately, the biggest lesson I took away was how to position Emblem for its next chapter and determine the best path forward. The answer is clear: start from the ground up, with the community at the core, and build through innovation.
By the end of the year, our goal was to completely fill the first round of Founder Vaults. Incredibly, we nearly filled the first two rounds. In the final hours, as the clock wound down, it all came together.
They don’t tell you that becoming a CEO doesn’t come with a job manual. Instead, it’s more like receiving a treasure map with a big X marking the spot — but no distinguishable landmarks to guide you there. Leadership demands vision, but it also requires a little bit of everything else.
You imagine the role as something out of a movie — jet-setting around the globe, attending high-stakes meetings, delegating tasks, and closing lucrative deals. In reality, most days are spent deep-diving into YouTube tutorials and having back-and-forth exchanges with ChatGPT, desperately trying to figure out what a trusted execution environment even is. Meanwhile, you’re simultaneously fielding your 80th Discord support ticket of the day, answering the same question yet again, and resisting the urge to pull your hair out.
Building isn’t easy, and the path forward is anything but straight. Every day is a balancing act of identifying problems and implementing solutions. The surprising truth is that the hardest part of the job isn’t building the technology — it’s managing the humans who make it happen. Time and expectation management become the ultimate challenges and the name of the game.
Much like fundraising, there’s no clear path forward. But unlike chasing a pot of gold, being a CEO means you’re tasked with building the pot yourself. You determine its size, what it can hold, and the material it’s made of. The mission is clear, but the outcome may vary as you adapt along the way.
The journey requires three hands on the wheel, meaning you can’t do this alone unless you plan to grow another one. Leadership is about bringing others along for the ride, sharing the burden, and steering the ship together.
If 2023 was the year of discovery and 2024 was the year of growth, then 2025 will undoubtedly be the year of execution. With that in mind, I’ve set some qualitative goals for the upcoming year. While I haven’t delved deeply into this year’s failures, rest assured they are acknowledged and will be addressed. Success, after all, isn’t built on fleeting moments of virality — it’s forged through countless falls and the resilience to keep going even when you feel ready to give up. Only then can you turn the page to the next chapter.
Goals for 2025
• Improve public product release timelines: Delivering on time is critical to building trust and momentum.
• Evolve team members into new positions based on their strengths: Empowering the team is how we grow collectively.
• Ensure innovation is a primary driver in decision-making: Staying ahead requires us to lead with bold ideas.
• Continue embedding a deep layer of transparency between the team and the community: Transparency builds trust, and trust fuels progress.
• Reimagine how the industry interacts with cross-chain products: Our work has the potential to reshape standards and expectations.
I couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead in 2025, and I hope you are too. Together, as a community that refuses to give up, we will make history.