I’m a designer and software engineer from a tiny island in the Caribbean focused on researching user experience of bitcoin payments and privacy. In my Bitcoin Design research, I’m interested in making the difficult comprehensible and more accessible for designers and developers. By doing so, I think we’re moving the needle in privacy and financial technology forward to something more familiar to the masses. At the same time, we are still staying true to the principals of bitcoin and equipping the sovereign individual with the tools they need to transact with confidence in this transparent ledger.

With my bitcoin-only product design and development agency, Peak Shift Ltd. we focus on bringing product designers and makers together to build the next evolution of neo-banks and financial tech — with bitcoin, and self-custody principals at their core.

Coming from the Caribbean, we have little access to merchant accounts and other basic financial services to be part of the global digital economy. Bitcoin provides open access and thus gives the needed opportunity for many people in similar regions. Therefore, on the application layer, we need to ensure we don’t design ourselves into giving up custody and being censored.

As well as being a contributor to the Bitcoin Design Community, a group of us recently launched a sub-community catering to DIY product makers called @BOLTFUN_btc where we hope to foster the maker culture. It's a bit more technical, but ultimately the goal of BOLT.FUN is to make bitcoin application creation more accessible to new developers coming to the space, and existing people making lightning applications. So to do so we’re putting on hackathons, created a technical guide, and have an application directory, which is also a way to find, and fund projects and makers.