Code Sovereign: Why I Left Venture to Build in Web3

 

Three years ago, I sat in a glass conference room with a term sheet in front of me and a slide deck behind me. We were raising a $25M growth fund, backing startups we believed would define the next decade. I was playing the role of strategist, closer, optimist.

 

But deep down, I didn’t believe in the game anymore.

Too many cap tables were bloated with capital that had no clue how the product worked. Too many “founders” were actually just marketers with great suits. Too many AI startups were running fine-tuned prompts on top of GPT. And too many venture firms had become financial cosplayers—raising from LPs on trend-chasing decks with no tech soul.

So I left.

I moved to Berlin.

And I started writing Solidity in silence.

From Pitch Decks to Git Commits

Crypto doesn't care about your pedigree. It doesn't care what college you went to. And it doesn’t care how charismatic your board meetings are.

 

What matters is:

• ·       Can you ship code?
• ·       Can you verify truth without trust?
• ·       Can your protocol run even if you disappear?

 

This was the energy I was hungry for.

So I unplugged from the VC matrix and became a dev again. I didn’t start a fund, or join a DAO, or go work for another unicorn. I started small. I built smart contracts for friends. I audited open-source repos. I rewrote tokenomics models that looked like Ponzi schemes dressed in Excel.

 

And in the quiet, I realized: Web3 isn't the future of finance. It’s the future of coordination.

 

Human Trust Doesn’t Scale

In venture, you spend a lot of time doing “due diligence,” which is a fancy way of saying you’re trying to figure out if someone’s lying.

• ·       You trust the founder’s narrative.
• ·       You trust the investor’s conviction.
• ·       You trust that no one’s hiding liabilities in a Delaware shell.
• ·       But what happens when we don’t need to trust anymore?
• ·       What happens when we replace narratives with math?

 

The magic of smart contracts is this: they let us coordinate with strangers, without permission, and without lawyers. That’s what blockchains are. They’re machines for coordinated belief.

And they’re only as good as the code behind them.

Most Web3 Code Is Trash

Let’s be honest. Most of what passes as “Web3” today is glorified marketing.

·       90% of tokens don’t have real utility.

·       70% of DeFi is forks with slightly different color schemes.

·       L2s are launching before they’ve even tested fraud proofs.

·       There’s a culture of MVP mania—ship fast, rug later.

 

But I believe that the next era of crypto won’t be about hype cycles. It’ll be about resilience.

 

As a dev, I care about:

·       Gas efficiency

·       Security-first architecture

·       Readability and maintainability

·       On-chain integrity

You don’t need 200,000 lines of code to build a powerful dApp. You need clarity. You need simplicity. You need provability.

The Projects I’m Building (and Why)

I’m currently building three core tools—each focused on a different problem in the crypto stack:

 

Ledger – a zero-knowledge accounting tool for DAOs, to allow on-chain treasuries to be verifiable without doxxing transactions.

BridgeSentry – a smart contract monitor that runs simulations on bridge activity to detect anomalies and prevent exploits before they drain liquidity.

SocialLayer – a minimalist, opt-in identity graph that lets you connect wallet interactions with basic verifiable credentials (without turning the blockchain into Facebook).

• None of these are moonshots.
• None of them are trying to “change the world.”
• They’re trying to make it less broken.

What I Look For in a Protocol

Here’s my quick sniff test before I contribute to a project:

 

·       ❌ If you say “tokenomics” and can’t define your burn curve, I’m out.

·       ❌ If your whitepaper uses more buzzwords than equations, I’m out.

·       ❌ If your roadmap looks like a VC fantasy novel, I’m out.

 

I want to build with teams that:

• Actually write their own contracts
• Understand failure modes
• Prioritize user safety over hype
• Document their code like it’ll be maintained for 20 years
• If that’s you, let’s talk. If not, keep farming Twitter threads.

Why Berlin?

Berlin is weird. Berlin is hard. Berlin is… perfect.

 

• It’s one of the last places where crypto still feels like a movement, not just a market.
• People here care about privacy. They care about protocol over personality.
• They don’t spend all day minting meme coins. They’re building rollups in Rust.

 

And here, I’m anonymous again.

 

Not “Peesh from a fund.” Not “Peesh the ex-CIO.” Just another dev, pushing code.

That’s exactly how I want it.

What’s Next

This blog—Code Sovereign—is where I’ll share what I’m building, breaking, learning, and unlearning.

 

Coming soon:

A breakdown of my zkDAO treasury architecture

“How to audit a Solidity contract like a human, not a robot”

What LLMs can and can’t do for protocol governance

Why most token incentives are backwards

You can subscribe if you’re a builder, hacker, or founder trying to do it right.

Or if you just want to watch a dev try to keep the faith in a world full of rug pulls.

 

Final Thought

• Crypto doesn’t need another billionaire. It needs better engineers.
• We’ve spent too long optimizing for hype cycles and venture valuations.
• It’s time to rebuild the trust layer—in code, not corporations.

So if you're here for the same reason I am—to make open systems more usable, more trustworthy, and more human-proof—

you’re in the right place.

 

Source From- https://shorturl.at/6pTg0

Let’s build.

– Peesh