In 2020 I got into cryptocurrencies, not blockchain in any technical sense yet. It was a world I’d always wanted to explore, but for years it had stayed in the background — something I heard about without ever really stepping in. I started the way most people do: buying small amounts on one of the big centralized exchanges, more out of curiosity than conviction. It was there, browsing through the assets on offer, that I kept running into a name that came up more and more often: DeFi.
DeFi pulled me in almost immediately, and not just for the yields. There was an idea underneath it that stuck with me: building freely, without permission, without an intermediary deciding what could or couldn’t be done. A protocol, a contract, rules written into code — and anyone could use it, or build something else on top of it. 2021 made that idea feel almost tangible: it was the year of the bull run, and with it an explosion of projects that seemed to appear every week — aggressive new DeFi protocols, the NFT boom, the first play-to-earn games, the wave (often more promise than substance) of the metaverse. Not everything born in those months made sense, but the pace at which it was born did: something was clearly being built, and anyone who wanted in could get in.
There was something familiar in all of this, even if I didn’t quite see it at the time. In 2001, still a kid, I’d gone from playing a video game to building tools that modified it — from consumer to someone building what other consumers would use. Twenty years later it was happening to me again, just with a different object in my hands: I’d entered the crypto world as a small investor, someone who buys and watches, and I was realizing that the part I actually cared about wasn’t buying — it was understanding how these things get built.
What does it take to build on a blockchain?
So I started studying what it actually meant to build on a blockchain. It was complex, but less than reverse-engineering a video game with no documentation and no organized community to help — here at least there was documentation, fragmented as it often was. I learned the basics: what a blockchain is, what a smart contract is, how a piece of code can live on a distributed network and enforce rules that nobody can unilaterally change once published. Things that forced me to unlearn a few habits from traditional web development, more than I expected going in.
Why Solidity is hard to approach from web2
But the moment I actually tried to get hands-on, I ran into an obstacle I hadn’t expected: Solidity, the language most smart contracts are written in, is not easy to approach coming from web2. It’s not just the syntax. It’s a different way of thinking: every operation has a computational cost you have to calculate and manage — gas, the unit of measure of the Ethereum Virtual Machine — and around that model sit rigid, very specific concepts that a JavaScript developer simply never had to consider. I realized this wasn’t just my own personal struggle: it was a real barrier to entry, one keeping an entire generation of web2 developers, used to a completely different paradigm, out of web3.
Finding Koinos: no ICO, no pre-mine
It was while looking for an alternative that I found Koinos, and it struck me right away as an ethically flawless project. No ICO, no pre-mine: the founding team — coming off an earlier project in another blockchain, which they’d left after a hostile attack on the network — had chosen to build by working for equity, without raising outside capital. A philosophy that felt close to Bitcoin’s original one: using available computational resources without needing dedicated hardware, with a Proof-of-Burn consensus designed to combine the economics of proof-of-work with the efficiency of proof-of-stake. And then there was governance: protocol upgrades happen through a network vote, not a hard fork — Koinos calls itself the most upgradeable blockchain there is, and the fact that it could evolve without splitting in two won me over.
The stack that made me stay
But what actually made me fall for it was the application stack: smart contracts are written in AssemblyScript, a syntax very close to TypeScript, familiar as I already was with JavaScript. The APIs are REST, not the usual opaque RPC endpoints of the blockchain world, and koilib made client-side integration as immediate as working with any other web API. Even the fee model followed the same philosophy of accessibility: no gas to pay on every transaction, but “mana,” a resource that regenerates and that a “payer” can even front on the end user’s behalf. Koinos wasn’t just solving a technical problem — it was deliberately lowering the exact barrier I’d just run into, giving web2 developers immediate access to web3.
I hadn’t written a single line of code on Koinos yet, but I already knew that was the door I’d been looking for. Not the most famous project, not the one with the biggest community or the loudest marketing — simply the one that, out of everything I’d looked at, seemed genuinely built to let people like me in. Sometimes a technology choice isn’t just about specs: it’s recognizing a philosophy you see yourself in.