ByteTree

What began in 2013 as “I’m sure I could hack something up to answer that” became a financial research and analysis business. I designed and built the platform end to end: the real-time blockchain engine, the terminal that presents it, the publishing sites that carry the research, and the brand that ties it all together.

I built the hardware to run a rack of blockchain nodes, then the software to make sense of them: a Node.js and MongoDB system that analyses the contents of each block as it arrives while pulling prices from exchange APIs across the network. At the time it was the only on-chain system working in real time, and the approach was copied broadly across the space.

A hefty refactor later, the engine could recalculate the state of any crypto asset every five seconds — a heartbeat it has kept for over a decade. As the questions grew, so did the data: multi-chain scanning, computation matrices, and the deep history needed to answer economic questions properly.

The engine needed a face. Starting from a simple web console, I auditioned Angular and React before settling on Vue.js — the fastest framework to actually get things done with — and built the ByteTree terminal on it: live charts and metrics fed by deep APIs, with real-time WebSocket streaming carrying the data from chain to screen in the same five-second rhythm as the engine underneath.

Data only matters if it changes what people understand. I created ByteTree’s publishing sites to carry the team’s research on Bitcoin’s economic and social impact to a wider audience, and implemented a Stripe-based subscription system that works transparently across all the ByteTree properties to monetise the research areas.

Our research has never played along with the ultra-bullish views of the maximalists — urging caution and care, which I’ll admit suits my own card-carrying scepticism.

BOLD pairs the oldest store of value with the newest: an index blending Bitcoin and gold, rebalanced by inverse volatility so each asset’s swings temper the other’s. Launched as an investable ETP with 21Shares, it took ByteTree’s research from the page into a real financial product — built on the same data and computation backbone as everything else in the platform.