Meet the Team and Leadership Bitcoin and energy, since 2015
Building at the intersection of Bitcoin and energy since 2015 — from community education in East Africa to open-source mining protocols. Turning stranded energy into non-custodial mining.
Access Status
Partners, operators, and builders can request access now. Public pages describe what is live today.
- Configured onboarding
- Verify an email to open your dashboard. Connection details are private and are issued there once your access is approved.
- Alpha
- Team conversations route into the same approved access process.
Leadership
John Wainaina Karanja
Founder
Founder of Melanin Ventures. Set out to turn power that would go to waste into value, using Bitcoin mining from our Boston headquarters.
Christian Kakoba Mugisho
Co-Founder
Co-founder. Leads Melanin’s expansion across emerging markets and the East Africa community education work, 2015–2025.
How we are set up
- Headquarters
- Boston, Massachusetts.
- Team
- Distributed across the Americas and Africa.
- Roots
- East Africa community education, December 2015 to December 2025.
Who builds it
- Lead Architect
- Stratum V2, consensus protocols and ARM optimization.
- Systems Engineer
- Embedded systems, firmware and hardware abstraction.
- Energy Analyst
- Microgrid integration, solar economics and battery storage.
- Community Lead
- Global chapters, education and developer relations.
- Product Designer
- UI/UX, accessibility and design systems.
- Operations Lead
- Infrastructure, deployments and support.
Work with us
- Open source
- We build in public. Check our GitHub.
- Bitcoin first
- We prioritize the most secure network.
- Energy aware
- We mine to stabilize, not to waste.
- Local impact
- We build for the edge, not just the core.
The team is small and hires irregularly. If the work here is the work you want to do, write and say what you would build — that reaches a person.
Non-custodial by construction is the direct-payment design. The published fee policy is 97/3 to miner and platform. Bitcoin is the public path. Confirm actual payment in your wallet; a dashboard record alone is not proof. Onboarding needs a verified email, private endpoints stay off public pages, and public code is reviewed before release.
