Jessie Santiago

@JessieBroke

What I Build

3 min read

The Thread

My work clusters around a few recurring themes: decentralized storage, crypto infrastructure, media, and coordination tools.

The earliest public thread is The Bitcoin Podcast Network, which I started co-hosting on in 2018 and became a part-owner of in 2020. It’s one of the oldest crypto podcasts. Since 2022 I’ve co-hosted Hashing It Out, a deep technical podcast where founders explain what they’ve built. It’s been running since 2018 and shares ownership with The Bitcoin Podcast. We also ran Just the Headers, a weekly crypto headline show I co-hosted with Dee (Demetrick).

The podcast work wasn’t separate from building. It was research infrastructure. Hundreds of interviews with protocol teams gave me a deep understanding of how decentralized systems actually work, and that knowledge fed directly into the projects I built.

Dad DAO was one of those projects: started with Michael “The Trosen One” Trosen and Demetrick “Fergulati” Ferguson as a paid learning community and incubator on Algorand. We built NFTs on the ARC-69 standard and created ARC-333, a metadata standard for NFT-controlled DAO governance, but never launched a token or the NFT collection. DAOs still didn’t make sense: the automation required was deeply intertwined with a philosophical problem of not being able to actually run one. The project never launched, but it raised real questions about coordination, incentives, and community ownership.

Durability Labs is the company I co-founded with Mark Spanbroek and Dmitriy Ryajov, where I served as COO. Our first project was Archivist, a decentralized storage protocol and one of the clearest examples of the infrastructure work. From April 2021 to June 2025 I was the first Logos Program Manager at the Institute of Free Technology, working on Codex, a decentralized storage protocol focused on strong data durability guarantees. That experience fed directly into founding Durability Labs.

I also recorded a podcast with someone from Civic after we had a press dinner together.

The range is wide: podcasting-as-infrastructure, DAOs, storage (Durability Labs / Archivist, Codex), and whatever comes next. The common thread is infrastructure. I build the layers other things sit on.

Evidence