Magna Mentality

An internal memo to the Magna team after our acquisition by Kraken

Onboarding our first dollar was hard. Onboarding our millionth dollar was nearly impossible. Onboarding our billionth dollar was the easiest thing we've ever done.

Now that the cat's out of the bag I just wanted to take some time to appreciate all of you and everything we've done together. I've been trying to play it nonchalant for aura's sake but looking back at the years... how the fuck did we do all that? What a come up.

As you all know, building in crypto isn't always glamorous. But by now you have to agree it is pretty damn well rewarding. Sometimes I write out our impact and it almost sounds made up. We managed billions despite a nuclear market crash. Earned the trust of millions of users and all the top protocols after literally everybody was trying to build our product. The grit alone means so much more to me than the business outcomes we drove. Extremely smart teams trust us with their highest stakes operations during crunch time. We manage money for the president. I always forget there was a time when Bruno and I knew literally nothing about crypto and still decided to start this company on belief in the industry.

Startups run on belief and I'm so grateful you all lent it to us over the years. Just think about our generational run in 2024. It was made possible by grinding it out with nearly zero usage for a very long time. Then in under a year we scaled to over $1B dollars, 1M users, and 7 figures in revenue? It's a startup fairy tale that we all get to own. Those quiet coding all-nighters before a launch were some of the best moments of my life. I wasn't always as confident as I needed to be as CTO. But the only antidote to that was to get in the trenches and learn everything I could from all of you: meticulousness, bravery, resilience. That took your trust in a hot-headed 22 year old and for that I'm forever grateful.

This startup was literally a dream come true for me. In the end, we aren't standing atop the shoulders of giants or wrapping over some API. We own the entire stack even down to the assembly code we wrote ourselves. We productionalized a niche data structure into open source powering millions of transactions per year. That's nothing short of technical masterpiece: a Magnum Opus. And now we're going to power the future of the asset class for one of the best financial firms in the world.

Same team, same mission. Only difference is that the sandbags are off.

Let's unleash the Magna Mentality at Kraken,

Arun & Bruno