Updates
A running record of what we're building at Equyt, written by me (Justin) as it happens. The product, the site, the company, the slow weeks included. Newest first.
Today was genuinely full. I spent most of it on conference calls, and a third business committed to coming on as a customer while we test, so the beta now has real companies waiting on it. Kurt and I also ran two interviews with founding-engineer candidates, and tomorrow I am talking with a CPA who could help make the accounting defensible. The customers matter, but I keep coming back to the people: the right founding partner, an engineer or a CPA, is the thing that changes everything from here.
I started quietly sending the site to a small circle I trust, and the replies came back within hours: plenty of constructive criticism and sharp questions (the good kind), some genuinely useful insight, a possible partnership, a conference call Kurt and I are taking next week, and a promise of our first customer for beta testing. Not bad for a soft open.
Opened a gated dev preview of the architecture for founding-engineer candidates: how ingestion, cost basis, fair value, and posting actually fit together. It's behind a password on purpose. If you want to see the architecture, email me at [email protected] and I'll send login info.
Started this page. It's a running log of everything that got us here, going back to the conference in 2025 that set me off. I'll keep posting as we go, the wins and the slow weeks both, because I'd rather show the work than polish a highlight reel.
Wrote the security and compliance page, which matters more to this audience than almost anything else. The short version: we're watch-only, we never touch your keys, and there's no path for money to move. I'd rather a skeptical CFO leave reassured than impressed.
Locked in the X handle and got Equyt verified as a business. Small thing, but it's the difference between looking like a real company and looking like a weekend project. Plain 'equyt' was long gone, so @equytbtc it is.
Pushed the first real version of the site live. It says what we're building, who it's for, and how the monthly close works once Bitcoin's on the balance sheet. Refreshing the page and watching it load on the actual domain never got old.
I came back from the road and went straight into design. I started laying out the real pages in earnest: the hero, how the close should read on screen, and the product mockup that had to carry the whole story. Most of what you see on the live site took shape during these days at the desk.
Honest note: not much shipped these few weeks. I was traveling and the build mostly sat. I'm leaving the gap in the log on purpose, because pretending every week is productive is exactly what I don't want this page to do.
Built the working product mockup that anchors the homepage: holdings, cost basis, unrealized gain, the transaction table, the 'close ready' badge. I wanted people to see the thing, not read a paragraph describing it. Designing real screens forces real decisions.
This is the part I'm at home in. Put everything behind Cloudflare, self-hosted the fonts, set the security headers, and tightened the whole stack down. I run my own servers, so I'd rather own this layer than rent it and hope.
Started hand-building the marketing site. No page builder, no template, just me and the markup, so every choice on the page is one I made and can defend. Slower up front, but nothing fights me later.
Spent way too long on the logo, and I'd do it again. It's a geometric ledger-bar "E" tilted twelve degrees that reads as a balance sheet if you squint. One orange, dark by default, built to sit next to serious finance software instead of a crypto exchange.
Made the call that shapes everything: Equyt is watch-only, full stop. We work from xpubs, descriptors, and read-only exchange keys, we never hold a key, and there's no withdrawal path anywhere in the design. The easiest way to earn a CFO's trust is to make the scary thing impossible.
Laid out the whole flow on paper before writing a line of product: connect the accounts, pull the transactions, apply cost basis, mark to fair value, post the journal entries, hand back audit-ready reports. If the close can't survive being drawn by hand, it won't survive an audit.
After an embarrassing number of bad names, Kurt and I landed on Equyt. It's a balance-sheet word, not a crypto one, which is the entire point for a CFO. We argued about the spelling for a while, then went and grabbed every handle we could before someone else did.
Talked Kurt into building this with me, which didn't take much once he saw the same gap I did. Having a partner to argue with (and to tell me when an idea is bad) changed the pace overnight. That's the week it stopped being a side project.
Sat down and mapped the entire close for a Bitcoin-holding business, step by step, just to find every spot it falls apart today. That ugly hand-drawn map turned into the outline for the whole product. The bugs in this space hide in the boring steps.
Went source by source: what you can actually pull from custodians and exchanges (Coinbase, BitGo, Anchorage, Kraken, River) and what a journal entry has to look like to land cleanly in QuickBooks or Xero. Turns out 'just sync it' hides a lot of sins.
This is where spreadsheets quietly go wrong. I dug into specific-identification lots, partial disposals, and making realized gain and loss land in the right period. Get this part sloppy and every number downstream is fiction.
Spent a few weeks just listening to finance people about how they handle Bitcoin on the books today. The answer was almost always a nervous spreadsheet and a quiet prayer before audit season. Nobody had a real tool, which is either terrifying or a very good sign.
Spent a weekend deep in FASB ASC 350-60, the rule that finally moved corporate crypto to fair value. Not a beach read, but it's the reason this product has to exist, so I stayed with it until it stuck.
Called my accountant and asked how I'd actually book Bitcoin on a company's balance sheet. The long pause told me everything. When the pros are improvising, there's usually a real product hiding in there.
Sat in a corporate treasury conference and kept hearing the same thing between sessions: companies are putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet with no real way to account for it. I couldn't stop turning it over on the flight home. That's the day the idea wouldn't leave me alone.