To build something that lasts, I'm prepared for the long haul.

It was December 2017—I was studying for my calculus final at the university library when I ran into a close friend. He said, "Bro, this thing called Bitcoin just hit $19k. My bags are fat right now. You gotta get in this crypto thing." Easy money? Say less. I registered for a Binance account on the spot, skipped the "overpriced" BTC and bought XRP, XLM, and TRON.

Well, you know how the rest of the story goes. $19k was the peak. Within days, my portfolio—and my ego—were in free fall, leaving me with credit card debt I couldn't pay off with my $12/hour college job. I swore off crypto for good.

Fast-forward three years, and the next cycle was booming. News headlines screamed "Bitcoin just hit $50k!" and "9-year-old makes $1M trading NFTs!" everywhere. But I was smarter than that—I wasn’t going to be burned twice. A couple of months went by before someone close to me urged me to read the Bitcoin whitepaper. To my surprise, it fascinated me.

Bitcoin aligned strangers through math and economics—no banks, no gatekeepers, just code and self-interest securing value. Trustless verification felt revolutionary: proof that well‑crafted incentives could coordinate global consensus. That was absolutely beautiful.

Soon after discovering Bitcoin, Ethereum captivated me further, expanding my view of what decentralized technologies could achieve. Smart contracts turned blockchains from passive ledgers into active economies. While Bitcoin was elegance in scarcity, Ethereum embodied possibility in composability—it didn’t just let you send and receive value; it let you create it.

I found myself speed-running every new ‘innovation’ the space could throw at me: yield farms promising ridiculous APYs, NFT projects spawning faster than browser tabs, and OHM forks launching on every chain. The tech still felt like magic, but the culture felt like Vegas. Then, tucked between the slot machines, I stumbled upon Beanstalk.

Much like Bitcoin, Beanstalk felt designed from first principles. It seemed to create a genuine economic model, carefully engineered incentives, and a design that echoed the same intellectual honesty that first drew me to Bitcoin. No flashing APY banners, just a whitepaper-level spec, code on-chain, and catchy farming metaphors. In a sea of noise, it felt like I had stumbled onto something real.

Beanstalk’s Silo rewarded participants for staying, while the Field created organic demand for lenders. It was economic elegance, not hype. With Ethereum as the infrastructure layer, scalable and censorship-resistant tokens representing stable value seemed like the next innovation needed to enable practical, on-chain economies. I Sowed my first couple plots and waited patiently.

While I waited, I joined an NFT‑infra startup—brilliant team, breakneck shipping—but NFTs, beyond identity and community, weren’t convincing. We were building fast, but I began to ask myself, “Was I working on something meaningful to me?” The longer I sat with it, the clearer it became: I don’t just want to write code—I want to work on systems grounded in clear economic incentives and built from first principles.

The morning of the Beanstalk governance exploit, my stomach dropped. Watching the liquidity spiral through Tornado Cash felt like watching a friend flat-line. But once the emotions settled, I was able to separate my emotions from analysis.

The breach wasn’t a failure of the model’s economics, and that distinction mattered to me. I had the sense that under the right conditions and with enough time, Beanstalk—or something like it—could thrive and scale to become the de facto low-volatility money used across DeFi. Unlike collateralized stablecoins like USDC, it didn’t require massive reserves or introduce systemic counterparty risk. It could grow organically and scale infinitely while staying true to the core principles of the space.

I started by submitting a couple PRs to get the UI back online. Casual commits snowballed into full‑time work. Reading the contracts, I saw exactly how the protocol checked and measured its own vitals—liquidity, demand for Soil, price, and debt levels—then tweaked incentives for system participants. As long as one person believed, the system could breathe. I wasn’t just reading code; I was watching an engine self-regulate in real time. Every new insight deepened my conviction: this was the first-principles tech I’d been yearning to contribute to.

But what really sealed it for me was the people. Not only were they some of the sharpest minds I’d worked with, but they also cared—about the future, the design, and each other. That kind of alignment is rare.

The exploit prevented Beanstalk from reaching its full potential in its infancy. Pinto gives us a second chance to do it right. Starting from Season 1 with a beefed-up model (including all the improvements made since Beanstalk's original launch) and the same commitment to first-principles design, Pinto represents more than a fork. It’s an opportunity to prove this model can scale sustainably.

Over the last couple years, I’ve learned that patience here isn’t measured in days or weeks, but years—the only tempo at which a new monetary system can take root. As the protocol earns creditworthiness, paying back lenders through what may be violent cycles of contraction and expansion, long-term participants will come. It’s a multi-year, multi-cycle arc, and the model is built to embrace that pace.

This isn’t just about rebuilding. It’s about fulfilling the long-term vision: creating Leviathan-free, low-volatility money that can make the promise of Bitcoin work for the world. I look forward to seeing it through.

--burr
june ‘25