Where cryptographic architecture meets ethical finance β my work explores Bitcoin, Layer 2 protocols, and digital asset sovereignty as tools of community empowerment.
Southern Methodist University (SMU) Β· Completed 2024
Blockchain Β· DeFi Β· Digital Asset Policy Β· AI in Finance
The relationship between money, power, and access has always been a moral issue before it was a technical one. The communities I served in the nonprofit sector were not underbanked by accident. They were excluded by design β by credit scoring algorithms, by geographic redlining encoded into data systems, by a financial infrastructure that optimizes for the already-wealthy.
Financial technology, at its best, is a wrench thrown into that machinery. Bitcoin and the protocols being built on top of it offer, for the first time in history, a genuinely permissionless, non-confiscatable financial layer. This is not speculative idealism. It is an engineering fact β and an ethical opportunity.
Research into the Ordinals protocol β the system enabling arbitrary data inscription onto individual satoshis β and its implications for digital ownership, identity, and decentralized creative economies.
Analysis of Lightning Network, Ark, and RGB Layer 2 solutions for Bitcoin. Submitted protocol improvement commentary and engaged directly with developer communities on ordinal asset standards.
Research on non-confiscatable wealth structures β Bitcoin as sound money, family trust architectures, and private placement strategies for communities historically excluded from generational wealth.
Concept and early development of LLM-powered tools for financial literacy β making complex asset structures, DeFi protocols, and tax-advantaged strategies accessible to underserved communities.
My engagement with the Bitcoin development community goes beyond passive study. I have submitted improvement requests and commentary on specific ordinal and Layer 2 asset standards, engaging with the technical questions of inscription permanence, provenance verification, and the ethical dimensions of digital scarcity.
This work is ongoing. As these protocols evolve, I am tracking their implications for digital creative economies β a direct intersection with my SCAD background in design and my AI research practice.
The following are live and developing projects. Links will be updated as projects launch:
Interactive Python-proxied Ordinals Explorer streaming live mainnet artifacts.
Source: github.com/cornishlikeadam/Bitcoin_simulator_l2
Coursework, capstone projects, and research produced during certification β Jan 2022 to Feb 2023
Early-stage LLM interface for decentralized finance education