Dear River team,

I've been interested in Bitcoin as financial infrastructure for longer than most people in my network — not as a speculative trade, but as a serious alternative to systems that consistently fail the people who need them most. Growing up in South Africa and spending my career in FinTech gives me a particular appreciation for what it means to build something people can genuinely trust with their money.

At Wealthbit, I spent three years as CTO building financial wellness products for employees — people who often had no meaningful relationship with their finances at all. The hardest problems we solved weren't technical; they were about earning and keeping trust in a domain where a single mistake can cost someone's rent. That shaped how I think about building financial software: security and reliability aren't features, they're the product.

River's commitment to full-reserve custody and publicly verifiable proof of reserves isn't just a compliance checkbox — it's a statement of values. Building the infrastructure from the ground up rather than depending on third-party custody is the kind of decision that's easy to skip and very hard to walk back. I find that kind of long-term thinking genuinely compelling in a team.

On the engineering side, I've spent several years in staff and lead roles: building and maintaining production backends, making architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers. At Ctrl Group I shipped a backend platform still running clinical trials across the NHS, and more recently I've been doing ML engineering work — fine-tuning models for production at NOSIBLE, and building RAG systems and safety evaluation frameworks for AI in regulated healthcare. I'm coming from a Ruby background rather than Elixir, though the design philosophy is familiar territory, and I'm a fast learner when the domain is right — and this domain is right.

I look forward to discussing how I can contribute. Thank you for your consideration.

Warmest regards,

Simon van Dyk