Making digital money legible to the people who have to answer for it.

My work is the question of how an institution verifies what happens on a public blockchain. In 2022 I led the technical work behind the first proof-of-reserves engagements for Binance, KuCoin and Crypto.com, and in 2023 Coinbase selected Sixpence from more than fifty proposals to build open-source proof-of-reserves software with its engineers. Since then the work has moved from exchange audits to regulators and central banks. In May 2026 I presented our measurements of Africa's stablecoin flows to governors from more than twenty countries at the BCEAO's conference in Dakar.

Before Sixpence I led the CSIR's distributed ledger research group, where we built the forensic tools used to trace stolen funds and analyse the Bybit hack, and before that I was an engineer at Eskom. That background is where the second half of my work comes from: Bitmach, which I co-founded with Rob Hersov and Stafford Masie, turns surplus electricity into computing that can be switched off the moment the grid needs the power back.

Sixpence itself is a working example of the newest subject I speak about. The company runs with a small human team and a larger workforce of AI agents. My chief of staff is an agent called Blikbrein, and our investigator, Speurder, has a public profile of his own.