Sidepit was a San Francisco exchange project I connected with while visiting for my own startup.
The idea came from Jay Berg, ex-Bloomberg, with a deep background in trading systems, blockchain, and fintech. The product was built around a fair public auction mechanism designed to make fast-moving markets more transparent.
I had long been interested in finance, market structure, and exchanges. Sidepit was the right place to contribute startup experience from aMUZE while getting serious exposure to trading infrastructure.
Within two months, I developed the full-stack MVP. That version helped the company close its pre-seed round and gave the team a concrete product base for the next financing conversation.
To understand what we were building, I studied exchange mechanics, created a Binance API trading bot, and built a mock exchange so I could reason about the system below the interface.
On the product side, I shaped the interface and interaction flow with Penpot, GIMP, and Inkscape, keeping the exchange mechanics understandable without hiding their complexity.
On the application side, I worked across TypeScript, Python, Next.js, NestJS, Flask, Tailwind, Postgres, and MongoDB to connect the trading experience to a working system.
On the infrastructure side, I handled Linux, Docker, Nginx, Node.js, DNS, GitHub, shell work, and deployment concerns so the MVP could be demonstrated with confidence.
The result was a working exchange MVP that could demonstrate the auction model, explain the trading flow, and make the financing story tangible.