Before 2001
Fishing for salmon and panning for gold
Our founder, Thomas, spent his childhood summers fishing for salmon and panning for gold in Alaska.
2001
A grandfather's legacy
When Thomas’s grandfather died in 2001, he left Thomas four years of tuition at the University of Washington and a gold coin.
Thomas graduated from the University of Washington with an economics degree, and 25 years later, he still has the coin.
Since his grandfather left it to him, it has grown 16x in value, while a U.S. stock market index, with dividends reinvested, has grown only 9x.
2008–2012
The bailouts and studying economics
The banks failed and the government bailed them out by printing money. For Thomas, it was the first time he could remember feeling so angry about something happening in the news.
He felt that the government had betrayed his generation and robbed them of their future.
When Thomas went to college, he studied economics to try to understand what had happened.
While studying economics, Thomas learned that the U.S. Constitution states that only gold and silver are money and that the U.S. government nationalized the banks and stole everyone's gold held within them during the Great Depression. He couldn't believe it. He became convinced that a return to the Gold Standard was needed.
2014–2017
Amazon and AI
Thomas started his career in finance at Amazon, where he became obsessed with AI back when AI meant machine learning and data science.
He left Amazon to teach himself data science and ranked in the top 1% of Kaggle competitors. Machine learning led him to Bitcoin and Ethereum through Numerai, where he earned his first bitcoin in 2016.
2017–2018
Betting on Bitcoin
By 2018, Thomas had deep conviction that Bitcoin was on a path to creating a new gold standard, the Bitcoin Standard.
He thought there was a 50% chance it would become a multi-trillion-dollar asset and a 50% chance it would go to zero. If it went to zero, he would lose one year of savings. If it worked, he could earn twenty years back.
He dollar-cost averaged every dollar he saved into Bitcoin throughout the year.
2021–2025
Building businesses and learning credit
Thomas co-founded Credit Coop, building credit infrastructure that has processed $2.5B+ in loan originations and repayments by helping stablecoin-enabled fintechs finance growth with their future cash flows.
At BaseCamp in Vermont, Thomas met Srijith. They instantly hit it off talking about how cryptographic verification could be used to underwrite credit for real businesses.
2025
Starting BitRepo
After leaving Credit Coop, Thomas went on sabbatical and almost immediately started ideating on new startups. Naturally, he began with his own problems. Bitcoin makes up the majority of his net worth, but he doesn't earn any yield on it.
Reflecting on his time building Credit Coop, Thomas kept coming back to its largest LP: a Bitcoin whale who borrowed against their Bitcoin on Morpho and deposited the stablecoins into Credit Coop’s vault.
- Borrowing cost
- about 5%
- The vault earned
- 12% after fees
- They kept
- roughly 7 percentage points
That's when Thomas decided to start BitRepo.
Borrowing against Bitcoin is solved, but lending against it isn't. BitRepo begins where those products stop: we find and underwrite borrowers.
The name BitRepo comes from the Bitcoin repo trade: borrowing dollars against Bitcoin and putting them to work in credit.
Gold became money because credit was built on top of it. We are building Bitcoin's credit system, loan by loan.
