Alias’ notebooks lay open—pages upon pages of schematics, deployment strategies, cryptographic blueprints, contingency plans. Months of work.
And yet, it wasn’t enough.
Pegged was still just an idea.
A perfect idea. A dangerous idea. And an unrealizable idea—at least, alone.
He exhaled, rubbing his temples.
Every path he had explored led to some form of reliance—on centralized infrastructure, on intermediaries, on human touchpoints that made the system vulnerable.
The dream was launch-and-forget, but to get there, the launch itself had to be airtight.
Alias closed his eyes. Satoshi had supposedly done it alone. But that was 2009.
Bitcoin had been simple. Bitcoin didn’t require governance, liquidity mechanics, lottery integration, front-end interfaces, or onboarding mechanisms that could reach the street-level economy. Bitcoin had been an elegant experiment—but Pegged? Pegged was a weapon aimed at the heart of centralised finance, and weapons needed precision in deployment.
His fingers tapped the desk. If he were to trust anyone, who would it be? What kind of people could reduce the risk rather than amplify it?
He wrote in his notebook:
The $PEG stablecoin and its lottery-driven liquidity model required a game theory expert. Someone who understood financial incentives on a deep level.
They had to know how capital flows behave.
They had to understand governance mechanics without believing in them too much—Alias remained deeply skeptical of DAOs.
And above all, they needed to design the system in such a way that once launched, it could never be captured.
Alias could conceptualize Pegged, but he needed someone who could write it—someone capable of:
Deploying smart contracts without exploitable attack surfaces.
Avoiding admin control or upgradeable proxies.
Hardcoding finality into the system.
This person needed to be silent, paranoid, and utterly unimpressed by ideology.
The DAO component of Pegged was a necessary evil—an insurance mechanism if things needed adjusting.
Alias had no faith in democracy on the blockchain. But some form of governance was needed—not to run the system, but to guard against its subversion.
He needed someone who understood governance deeply enough to break it before it could be broken by others. Someone pragmatical enough to design governance in a way that wouldn’t lead to capture or bureaucratic sclerosis.
Alias hated the TradFi system, but he knew it wouldn’t ignore Pegged. There would be attempts to co-opt, to corrupt, to suppress.
He needed someone who understood how these attacks would be structured before they came.
This person should also be creative enough to find ways of discretely funding the Pegged project.
The greatest idea in the world was worthless if no one could use it.
Alias needed Pegged to be accessible. If it was just another technical curiosity, it would fail. If it was intuitive, it would spread like wildfire.
He needed a designer who could make something deadly simple—something that a mantero selling fake Gucci bags in Rome could understand immediately.
Alias closed his notebook and exhaled.
This was the minimum viable team.
Small enough to remain hidden.
Skilled enough to make no mistakes.
Skeptical enough to avoid self-deception.
And yet… bringing people in meant risk.
He would have to reach them, test them, recruit them—without exposing himself.
He stared at the ceiling. He had wanted to do this alone. But the world had moved past the days of solitary architects like Satoshi.
If Pegged was to be truly irrevocable, he had to take one final risk.
He had to build a team.
