Award-winning blockchain developer

On X/Twitter my bio says "award-winning blockchain developer".

It sounds a bit grand, so let me explain.

I had been working as a Solana developer since late 2021, but before that I had no experience with cryptocurrency or blockchains at all. I first heard about flash loans through a Finematics video. The idea immediately interested me.

A flash loan is money you borrow and repay within a single blockchain transaction. You can use the borrowed money during that transaction, but the money and the fees have to be repaid before it finishes. If you fail to repay it, the transaction fails and the loan is undone.

You do not need collateral. There has to be enough money available to lend you, of course, but the lender does not need your credit history. Repayment is part of the transaction itself. It is a very strange kind of loan.

I wanted to make a simple, independent flash loan program for Solana, with code that other people could read and understand. I also wanted a program of my own on mainnet - the live Solana network, where it would be available for people to use.

I had been entering hackathons - competitions where you build software projects - to push myself further into Solana development. So when Solana Sandstorm came along in 2023, I decided to make the flash loan idea my entry.

I finished the program and deployed it to mainnet. There was documentation to write, and I made tools to help people use it. Then I put my own money into the lending pools. Otherwise, what was anyone going to borrow?

The submission had a BONK theme, since BONK was a sponsor. The project came second in the Bonking with Bonk track at Solana Sandstorm. I was happy with that. I had come into crypto knowing nothing about it, so having the judges think well of something I had built meant something to me.

Later, Jupiter listed Flash Loan Mastery as a reference in its own implementation. That was nice to see.

You can have a look at Flash Loan Mastery here.