Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48089009

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I'm Alex, founder and CEO of River. I also wrote the first line of code and still ship PRs.

River is a client-first Bitcoin-only financial institution building the financial app people use every day to save in bitcoin and spend in dollars. We custody over 25,000 BTC, serve individuals and businesses across the U.S., and are profitable. We publish cryptographic proof of reserves monthly and our company financials annually.

Here's what our engineering team is working on:

  - Real-time Bitcoin and USD payments, trading, and settlement on an Elixir monolith with a unified GraphQL API
  - Next-generation Bitcoin custody with quorum signing, key ceremonies, and geo-redundant infrastructure
  - Scaling our ML/AI systems (Python, PyTorch, XGBoost, LLMs) to automate operations and tackle fraud/risk
  - A ground-up React and React Native rewrite of our consumer app
  - Porting our Lightning Network infrastructure from Go into Elixir

  - Staff Software Engineer (Elixir) | $200K-$250K
  - Senior Software Engineer (React, Full-stack) | $150K-$220K
  - Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer | $200K-$250K

I'm Alex, founder and CEO of River. I also wrote the first line of code and still ship PRs.

River is a client-first Bitcoin-only financial institution building the financial app people use every day to save in bitcoin and spend in dollars. We custody over 25,000 BTC, serve individuals and businesses across the U.S., and are profitable. We publish cryptographic proof of reserves monthly and our company financials annually.

Here's what our engineering team is working on:

  - Real-time Bitcoin and USD payments, trading, and settlement on an Elixir monolith with a unified GraphQL API
  - Next-generation Bitcoin custody with quorum signing, key ceremonies, and geo-redundant infrastructure
  - Scaling our ML/AI systems (Python, PyTorch, XGBoost, LLMs) to automate operations and tackle fraud/risk
  - A ground-up React and React Native rewrite of our consumer app
  - Porting our Lightning Network infrastructure from Go into Elixir

  - Senior Software Engineer (React, Full-stack) | $150K-$220K
  - Staff Software Engineer (Elixir) | $200K-$250K
  - Staff Software Engineer (ML/AI) | $200K-$250K

completely and provably false

That's because they have no idea what they're talking about. At a certain point you have to ask yourself why Bitcoin is worth $2T and no enterprise blockchain has ever taken off. How many years more of this trend is required to prove the "technologists" are wrong? It's already been 16 years.

And while I don't believe in appeal to authority, it's worth mentioning that I have been working in this field for pretty much my entire career and TA'd the first Stanford CS course on blockchains and crypto currencies in 2015. I very much know what I'm talking about and the people at Vanguard are blindly parroting what Deloitte and McKinsey are telling them about "blockchain".

The exact opposite is true. Blockchain "technology" is useless beyond its ability to enable Bitcoin - a monetary innovation. Using it for anything other than that is simply trying to find a problem for a solution. Crypto beyond Bitcoin is also largely useless beyond serving as a democratized casino.

Because major banks won't support startups looking to compete with them. Why would JPM, BoA, etc. service Mercury who is going after their SMB business banking vertical? Banking is a cartel in the US. The bank lobby makes it as hard as possible to compete with them.