---
title: Made "stock exchange" from scratch
description: ""
lang: en
date: 2007-09-01T12:00:00.000Z
tags: []
---

**stealth startup** · Lead Developer

for ~1 year in late 2000s

## What I did

- Developed a system that allowed investors to buy and sell shares in various non-traditional assets
- In short, you could “IPO” your business, website, or even a cow, if you wanted. Any income source.
- We had dividends, splits and merges, direct exchange between assets and a lot of other machinery for all the roles
- Something like modern tokenization, but centralized and in the pre-Bitcoin era
- The founder came with this raw idea and I brought this project to production, solo

## What I achieved

- Made a fully working product with many ideas ahead of their time (we even had proto-passkeys!)
- Chose a perfect time to quit

## What I learned

- How to build systems working with money
- What to do when your client decides to build a Ponzi scheme based on your beautifully crafted exchange system, and gets himself in prison for fraud
- How to spot exploitable parts of systems

## Skills

[PHP](/skill/php/), TypeScript & JavaScript, [Application
Security](/skill/application-security/), Stakeholder Management