Apple, Google, Cash App alums ditch Big Tech to build on bitcoin

AUSTIN — On a Friday morning last spring, Mark Suman called out sick from his job as a senior engineering project manager at Apple and made his way downtown to a place called the Bitcoin Commons, a sort of clubhouse for enthusiasts of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, situated a few blocks south of the Texas State Capitol.

At the time, Suman was, in his words, “an active hobbyist,” tinkering with the technology in his spare time. “I actually played around with it a bit within Apple as well,” he says. “There’s not a lot I can say, other than we were always exploring new technologies, and so I was playing around with some of the open-source bitcoin tools within Apple and doing some exploratory work.”

Suman was there for the annual ‘Bitcoin Takeover’ event. He had followed many of the speakers online and when he saw the gathering pop up on his feed, he took the day off to see it for himself.

“I was sitting in the crowd wanting to get into the space and really build something new and build something novel,” Suman recalled.

What happened instead was the beginning of a professional pivot: he struck up a conversation with a developer after a talk at the Commons, and was introduced to other coders who were winding down a project called Mutiny. Within a few months, Suman handed in his notice at Apple and with the developers he’d met, pivoted into something bigger — co-founding Open Secret, a startup reimagining how user data is stored in the cloud. Instead of relying on centralized databases, the company encrypts data to each individual user — even after it’s uploaded. So if there’s a breach, there’s nothing to steal, Suman explained. No honeypot.

The leap was not without stakes.

“There are plenty of sleepless nights,” he said. “I’ve got a family, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a kid off at university.”

He had spent years working on privacy infrastructure — tackling tough technical problems around user protection at scale — but saw a way to do it better with blockchain. “Apple likes to talk a big game about privacy,” he says. “And having been there, I’ve seen very deep within a lot of their systems that they do care about privacy at every level.”

That vision — and the Commons — helped give him conviction. The builders there were all laser focused on creating something that mattered.

Bitcoin Commons sits on the second floor of the Littlefield Building at the corner of Congress Avenue and Sixth Street — where the broad boulevard to the Capitol collides with the noisy sprawl of Austin’s nightlife district. It’s an apt metaphor for the space itself.

By day, it serves as a clean, open-plan coworking hub for bitcoin operators and builders. At night, it transforms into a gathering place for rogue developers and off-the-record meetups. Events here draw a blend of venture capitalists, open-source contributors, off-grid energy technicians, and Lightning engineers — developers who build software to make bitcoin faster and cheaper to use. On some afternoons, once happy hour hits, the kitchen in the back converts into a bar.

“Bitcoin is the most important technological innovation in any of our lifetimes, and it needs its due,” said Parker Lewis, one of the stewards of the Commons and the author of a new book on bitcoin called “Gradually, Then Suddenly.”

“And so while bitcoin has no CEO and no marketing team, we here at the Bitcoin Commons and Bitcoiners all over the world help educate people about bitcoin, why it’s important, what’s being built, and present a vision for the future,” continued Lewis.

“The vibe, it’s always high signal,” said Dan Lawrence, CEO of OBM, which manages energy use for industrial-scale mining farms. Lawrence said he was “thankful” that the U.S. government had become a little more pro-bitcoin under the new administration, but added, “No matter what happens anywhere, everybody here is always going to bleed bitcoin.”

This year, the Commons feels different — not because bitcoiners have changed, but because the world around them has. The mood is bullish. Strategic. Triumphant, even.

Bitcoin‘s price mirrored this optimism, surging to an all-time high of nearly $110,000 in January, coinciding with Trump’s inauguration. By early April, it had retraced to the low $70,000s before rebounding to nearly $85,000 as of Saturday morning — volatility that underscores the market’s sensitivity to political developments and investor sentiment.

Just a year ago, the vibe in the Commons was cautious. Even bitcoin — the asset largely spared by securities law — felt the chill of an aggressive regulatory regime. Developers were being arrested around the world. Wallet providers were being pressured. Open-source projects landed on sanctions lists. The question then was, who would be next?

Then came the election. Trump’s return to the White House brought with it a full-court press of pro-bitcoin policy moves. Within his first 100 days, he’d pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and three co-founders of the BitMEX crypto exchange, established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and appointed a “crypto czar” to oversee the federal government’s digital asset efforts. Even skeptics found themselves nodding.

“I was in Nashville when Trump spoke,” Suman recalled of the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Tennessee, where Trump made his first major address to the crypto industry. “I wasn’t planning on going. But you know, when someone like that is in town, you go see it.”

Suman says he feels Trump has delivered on his promises to the crypto community for the most part. Still, he remains cautious. “I am not one who embraces politicians,” Suman said. “I’m kind of apolitical as far as which side. So I only trust them until I see how it’s actually playing out in our life. So far, I think it’s going well, but it could really change.”

Kevin Hurley, CTO at Lightspark, says Washington’s stance toward crypto appears to be shifting, with regulators like the SEC taking a less combative approach — moving away from lawsuits and toward clearer capital markets rules. “Hopefully now we’re actually going to have some clarity on what is and what isn’t a security, what can actually be done,” he said.

But even in a friendlier political climate, caution over government involvement remains a feature, not a bug, of the crypto community.

Joe Kelly, CEO of Unchained — a startup that helps clients store bitcoin securely by holding their own private keys — said it’s smart to be careful what you wish for when it comes to the U.S. government owning a lot of bitcoin. “That can go other ways,” he said.

To date, the government’s so-called Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has underwhelmed some digital asset advocates, since it’s limited to bitcoin previously seized in enforcement actions — not newly purchased assets or sovereign investment. Still, the administration has directed the Treasury and Commerce Departments to explore budget-neutral ways to acquire more bitcoin.

Kelly acknowledges a shift in the regulatory atmosphere, but he’s also wary of premature celebration, even with big market wins like the launch of exchange-traded funds that allow investors widespread access to bitcoin.

“If something like the ETF had launched too soon, I think it could have distracted from the people building on the actual technology itself,” Kelly said. “We’ve had the fortune that for most of Unchained’s life there wasn’t an ETF,” he added of the firm’s efforts to educate investors on how to store their crypto.

The shift has had ripple effects across the industry, including insurance.

Becca Rubenfeld, COO of Anchor Watch, says regulatory movement is opening the door for bitcoin to be treated like any other financial asset. Traditional insurers don’t cover bitcoin directly — they insure the infrastructure around it. But if bitcoin becomes an admitted asset on insurance company balance sheets, that changes everything.

“Currently, the industry is extremely underserved,” Rubenfeld told CNBC. “But what Anchor Watch is doing is specifically insuring the asset itself. So we built a proprietary custody solution. And when customers use us for custody services, Lloyd’s of London backed insurance is included in those services.”

The demand is growing. So is the pressure to build — and secure — the technical infrastructure that makes bitcoin work.

Mike Schmidt, executive director of Brink, which funds open-source bitcoin developers through a nonprofit structure, emphasized the importance of supporting the engineers maintaining bitcoin’s underlying infrastructure. “Bitcoin needs engineers,” he said.

“We have a $2 trillion asset. We have strategic reserves of bitcoin being held by countries, and there’s just this small group of engineers that are keeping this thing together at the code base,” Schmidt said. “There’s only maybe 40 full-time engineers working on this. So we want to make sure that the engineering growth can keep pace with its broader adoption.”

Lisa Neigut started as a back-end engineer at Cash App, where she worked on their internal bitcoin product, before moving to Blockstream and spending six years as an open-source developer on the Lightning Network. These days, she runs Bitcoin++, one of the largest technical conference series in the space, with six events planned across six countries this year.

“Bitcoin++ is focused on bringing together bitcoin developers and builders to talk about what they’re working on — the frontier of bitcoin,” Neigut said. “You can get an idea of what bitcoin is going to look like tomorrow.”

That sense of momentum resonates with filmmaker Alana Mediavilla, who spent five years at Google working on films about big data and cloud infrastructure. She screened her new documentary, Dirty Coin, a feature-length project looking at bitcoin’s energy footprint and the people behind the infrastructure, at the Commons.

“I had put in my time in the cloud space,” she says. “I understood what data centers were, I understood where it was going, and I also understood how much energy it takes to run these huge facilities that right now are running the backbone of our society.”

Her goal wasn’t to necessarily defend bitcoin mining but to broaden the conversation. “I just want to get everybody’s data center literacy up to a certain point where we can continue to have conversations about it, because it’s not going away.”

She describes the crowd in Austin as a coming together of people “very committed to their craft” — and in her view, driven more by shared ideals than by profit-seeking.

“People think that it’s like a get-rich-quick,” she said. “Maybe those were the old days for bitcoin. Now, if you want 100x you should look at altcoins and meme coins and other stuff, but you’re probably not going to get that with bitcoin.”

“What brings them together is that they want to have better money, and they want to have a more fair world,” she added. “So the principles are solid. How we implement those principles — that’s where the variety and spice of life comes in.”

A surge of new funding is also reshaping bitcoin’s builder economy.

Venture investment in bitcoin-related startups soared in 2024 alongside the crypto market’s rally. The number of pre-seed deals in the space climbed 50% last year, according to research from Trammell Venture Partners, an Austin-based VC firm focused on bitcoin-native startups. Across all early-stage funding rounds, nearly $1.2 billion has been invested in bitcoin companies since 2021.

The renewed interest comes after years of technical upgrades to the bitcoin protocol and growing confidence in its long-term resilience.

“Serious people no longer question whether bitcoin will remain 15 or 20 years into the future,” said Christopher Calicott, managing director at Trammell. “So the next question becomes: Is it possible to build what the founder is trying to achieve on bitcoin? Increasingly, the answer is yes.”

PitchBook projects that crypto venture funding will surpass $18 billion in 2025 — nearly doubling the annual average from the previous two-year cycle. Much of that capital is flowing into bitcoin infrastructure and applications — payments, privacy tools, custody solutions — rather than the speculative trading platforms of previous cycles.

Turning ideals — and venture dollars — into reality still requires real-world infrastructure. And that’s where entrepreneurs like Steve Barbour, the founder of Canadian firm Upstream Data, come in. He’s spent years building off-grid mining containers for remote oilfields, but this spring, he’s expanding operations into Wyoming, a bet he attributes directly to the Trump administration’s rollback of energy regulations and renewed push for domestic production.

Wyoming — home to both sprawling coal operations and some of the country’s most permissive crypto laws — has emerged as a hub for bitcoin miners and the lawmakers who support them.

The administration’s latest executive orders loosen environmental restrictions and encourage more fossil fuel development — a boon for oilfield miners like Barbour, even as critics warn it could come at a steep climate cost.

“I’m extremely optimistic and bullish on Trump’s administration,” Barbour said. “The EPA finally came out with a new stance on all these things they’ve been doing to just destroy the energy sector in America, which has affected us very negatively. I’m seeing a lot of things going the right way now with the decisions the Trump administration is making, and clearly they’re trying to attract investment in America and manufacturing.”

Zaprite’s Lewis, one of the Commons’ most vocal policy thinkers, agrees that things are moving in the right direction — particularly around the government’s decision to establish a formal national bitcoin reserve.

While a crypto executive order is an important first step, “codifying it with law will help drive further regulatory clarity that the U.S. is open for bitcoin,” Lewis said. “It will also be good for the country … the biggest priority would be for the regulatory clarity piece, pushing Sen. Lummis’ Bitcoin Act to codify and make permanent.”

Senator Lummis, a longtime advocate for the industry, is pushing legislation to codify bitcoin protections into federal law. Her proposed legislation outlines a plan for the U.S. to buy bitcoin with “existing funds” of the Treasury Department, which includes tax revenue. The idea, in part, is to position bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset — one that could appreciate over time and reduce reliance on debt. The senator has said that the ultimate goal is to reduce the federal deficit, as well as position bitcoin alongside gold and other hard assets as a way to strengthen the dollar over time.

Without the Bitcoin Act becoming law, Lewis warns that today’s tailwinds could reverse with a single administration change.

But while Washington debates bitcoin’s role in the future of the U.S. economy, Suman was already betting his own on it.

“Why did I leave this really cushy job at Apple, where I was getting paid a lot and had stock and that kind of stuff, to come here, where my future is uncertain?” he said. “It’s the possibility of building something new that I think is really needed in the world. And I hope that it pans out. … If it doesn’t, and we go down in a glory of fire, at least I will have tried something that I really believe in.”

Even after he accepted the offer to join Mutiny — later pivoting into Open Secret — things didn’t calm down. “That was right when a prominent group of developers were arrested,” he recalled. “They were developing an app called Samurai, and they got arrested. I had accepted my offer with Mutiny, but I had not yet left Apple.”

The gamble wasn’t just career-based. It was emotional. Existential.

“Knowing that people were being arrested and there was a lot of uncertainty, I still dove in,” he said. “The guys said, ‘Listen, if you’re worried, we can just call this off and you can stay at Apple,'” Suman recalled. “But I said, ‘No, I really believe in what we’re building. Let’s make this thing scale.'”