Parv Prabhakar.
I build at the intersection of finance, regulation, and crypto, most recently a compliance-first onchain real-estate protocol. I care about the unglamorous parts: the legal structure, the partnerships, the trust that makes ambitious things actually ship.
At 12, I made Zynga Poker's national leaderboard, and people started asking to buy in-game chips for real money. I was too young to open a bank account, so I went looking for another way to get paid and found Bitcoin. I'd sell chips for BTC, then sell that BTC for cash into friends' accounts on P2P sites like LocalBitcoins, where I became a top seller. I've been building in crypto ever since.
That instinct, finding the opening and building before anyone says it's allowed, eventually pulled me into the hardest version of the problem I could find: bringing real-world assets onchain without hand-waving away compliance. With Estate Protocol I built a tokenization protocol and marketplace on Arbitrum, settling in USDC, plus the legal, underwriting, and partnership scaffolding around it.
Along the way we originated $13M+ of real estate onchain, launched the first onchain golden visa, and partnered with Circle, Arbitrum, and a network of regulated platforms. I was recognized with an O-1A visa for extraordinary ability. But the part I'm proudest of is the team: A-players in legal, marketing, and origination who chose to build something hard, together.
I read widely, still love a game with asymmetric information, and spend a lot of time mapping the people and ideas moving the tokenization, DeFi, and stablecoin space. If you're working on something at that frontier, I'm usually a quick DM away.
Working on something interesting?