Apple, Google, Cash App alums ditch Big Tech to build on bitcoin, fueled by VC money and friendly White House

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

At the time, Suman was, in his words, “an active hobbyist,” tinkering with the technology in his spare time. “I actually played almost 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 dramatizing around with some of the open-source bitcoin tools within Apple and doing some exploratory work.”

Suman was there for the annual ‘Bitcoin Takeover’ in any case. 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 room and really build something new and build something novel,” Suman recalled.

What happened instead was the beginning of a expert pivot: he struck up a conversation with a developer after a talk at the Commons, and was introduced to other coders who were zigzag down a project called Mutiny. Within a few months, Suman handed in his notice at Apple and with the developers he’d met, depended into something bigger — co-founding Open Secret, a startup reimagining how user data is stored in the cloud. As an alternative 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 boost, Suman explained. No honeypot.

The leap was not without stakes.

“There are plenty of disturbed 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 technological problems around user protection at scale — but saw a way to do it better with blockchain. “Apple likes to talk a big game all round privacy,” he says. “And having been there, I’ve seen very deep within a lot of their systems that they do concern about privacy at every level.”

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

Bitcoin Commons sits on the second floor of the Littlefield Structure 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 precinct. 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 assemblage place for rogue developers and off-the-record meetups. Events here draw a blend of venture capitalists, open-source contributors, off-grid animation technicians, and Lightning engineers — developers who build software to make bitcoin faster and cheaper to use. On some afternoons, without delay 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 shortages 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 furnishing team, we here at the Bitcoin Commons and Bitcoiners all over the world help educate people about bitcoin, why it’s notable, what’s being built, and present a vision for the future,” continued Lewis.

“The vibe, it’s always high signal,” communicated 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 ripen into a little more pro-bitcoin under the new administration, but added, “No matter what happens anywhere, everybody here is many times going to bleed bitcoin.”

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

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

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

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

“I was in Nashville when Trump spoke,” Suman recalled of the Bitcoin 2025 congress in Tennessee, where Trump made his first major address to the crypto industry. “I wasn’t planning on going. But you be informed, 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 uncountable 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 at most 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, means Washington’s stance toward crypto appears to be shifting, with regulators like the SEC taking a less combative propose to — moving away from lawsuits and toward clearer capital markets rules. “Hopefully now we’re actually going to sooner a be wearing some clarity on what is and what isn’t a security, what can actually be done,” he said.

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

Joe Kelly, CEO of Unchained — a startup that expropriates clients store bitcoin securely by holding their own private keys — said it’s smart to be careful what you urge 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 Critical Bitcoin Reserve has underwhelmed some digital asset advocates, since it’s limited to bitcoin previously seized in enforcement deportments — not newly purchased assets or sovereign investment. Still, the administration has directed the Treasury and Commerce Departments to explore budget-neutral ways to purchase more bitcoin.

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

“If something much the same as the ETF had launched too soon, I think it could have distracted from the people building on the actual technology itself,” Kelly broke. “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 assemble their crypto.

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

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

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

The call for 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 order, emphasized the importance of supporting the engineers maintaining bitcoin’s underlying infrastructure. “Bitcoin needs engineers,” he said.

“We secure a $2 trillion asset. We have strategic reserves of bitcoin being held by countries, and there’s just this close group of engineers that are keeping this thing together at the code base,” Schmidt said. “There’s not maybe 40 full-time engineers working on this. So we want to make sure that the engineering growth can have pace with its broader adoption.”

Lisa Neigut started as a back-end engineer at Cash App, where she worked on their internal bitcoin offering, 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 complex 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 surrounding what they’re working on — the frontier of bitcoin,” Neigut said. “You can get an idea of what bitcoin is going to look liking tomorrow.”

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

“I had put in my at intervals in the cloud space,” she says. “I understood what data centers were, I understood where it was going, and I also conceded 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 surely defend bitcoin mining but to broaden the conversation. “I just want to get everybody’s data center literacy up to a certain aim 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 “jolly committed to their craft” — and in her view, driven more by shared ideals than by profit-seeking.

“People create 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 matter, but you’re probably not going to get that with bitcoin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The administration’s latest executive orders