The work
Patterns for knowing without seeing, exchanging without a shared ledger, and connecting people to institutional systems they were never meant to navigate alone.
A small set of inventions — five patent families filed between 2014 and 2018 — and the marketplace problems they keep solving in new forms a decade later.
Focus areas
Resolving who someone is without capturing what they are.
Correlating offline and online presence through intermediate identifiers, so that useful inference can happen without the personally-identifying payload. The question is not whether you can identify someone — it is whether you should have to.
Rules that govern transactions between parties who don't share a ledger.
A rule-set language for value exchange among customers, merchants, and financial institutions. Stored value moves through the system according to constraints — not through a unified chain, but through an agreement graph.
Systems that know where without knowing who.
Geospatial signal is one of the richest features a system can use — and one of the most dangerous to mishandle. The invention here is the discipline of using location as input without it becoming a dossier.
Events that fire actions when conditions align.
Preselected profiles plus trigger events produce opportunities. This was a 2016 formulation of what 2026 calls an agent workflow. The same graph primitives — profile, trigger, action — apply to ad serving, supply chain, fraud, and civic response.
Systems designed for the person who operates them next.
An operating ethic, not a patent. Every non-trivial system should be designed for the moment its original builder is unreachable. The discipline shows up in API design, in access control, in documentation, in failure modes, and — most importantly — in who the system serves when nothing is going wrong.
Infrastructure for the people institutions weren't built for.
Legal process, financial underwriting, healthcare navigation, immigration, civic records — systems designed around institutional actors that leave individuals to navigate alone. A recurring thesis: the apparatus can be reproduced at the speed and cost an individual can actually afford.
From the essays
An operating principle
Design for the person who operates the system next — not for yourself.
Most of my operating ethic can be distilled to one rule: build as if the person inheriting the system is someone you owe a fair chance to succeed. It shows up in API design, in access control, in documentation, in family systems, and — when you look honestly — in how seriously someone takes the work of inventing in the first place.
Read the essay →
Current work
The 2017 Closed-Loop Currency patent described rule sets binding multiple stored-value sources into a single transaction. The infrastructure to actually do that — mobile secure elements, software-defined POS, real-time payment rails, stablecoin settlement, agentic payments — only arrived in the last five years.
Seven work areas, each grounded in the same primitive: a programmable wallet that carries multiple sources of value across multiple rails, with the rules — not the tender — as the product. Co-founded the U.S. Faster Payments Council.
Read the current work →Patent portfolio