Covenants, CTV, And Making Things Easier For Developers

Builder: Stu

Language(s): Rust

Contributes To: CTV Prototypes, Char Network

Work(s/ed) At: ZBD

Before Bitcoin, Stu spent his days working as a Windows System Administrator and in IT Support. His routine consisted of long boring days of sitting in a chair engaging in monotonous maintenance work, reconfiguring systems, and resetting passwords for users who’d forgotten them.

It was the kind of job where a problem occurring that actually requires you to engage your attention in a meaningful way is so rare an occurrence that you wind up sitting around hoping for something like that to happen most of the time. 

Stu spent most days just browsing through Reddit threads during his copious amounts of downtime. But this turned out to not be such a bad scenario in the end, as this was how Stu found himself pulled into the Bitcoin space around 2017. 

Like many Bitcoiners, or rather soon-to-be Bitcoiners, back in that period, Stu got sucked into the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and altcoin frenzy of the time. Also, like many Bitcoiners around that time, he wound up getting burned financially by some bad investments in random unknown projects in which he probably shouldn’t have invested in the first place.

Inevitably the gravity of Bitcoin pulled him down the proverbial rabbit hole. 

After a few years of learning more deeply about Bitcoin, Stu hit a period of frenzy and quit his job at the peak of the 2021 bull market to look for opportunities to work in the Bitcoin space. By that time the programming language Rust had become widely used in different Bitcoin projects and libraries, so Stu began learning it so that he could contribute to Bitcoin. 

Towards the end of 2022, his search for a job in the space ended when he was hired by Michael Tildwell to work at ZBD, a company that integrates bitcoin payments into videogames using the Lightning Network. 

Working At ZBD 

Stu worked DevOps at ZBD, but in his free time he kept working at prototype Rust projects.

“Most of my side projects are related to what I was interested in at the time, as I was working at ZBD I started making games that could use bitcoin,” Stu told Bitcoin Magazine. 

To start, he built a multiplayer web game, rain.run, based around players collecting lightning bolts for rewards in satoshis, to get more familiar with building applications that have to talk to each other over a network. Afterwards he built a simple connect4 game played over the Nostr protocol. 

“[This] was a great way to learn how Nostr worked,” said Stu.

“I attended btc++ in Austin in 2024, which was the Script edition.” The four day conference was the most dense forum for discussion around Bitcoin script improvements and covenants in the last year or so. 

“There seemed to be, at the time, some kind of consensus developing for covenants on Bitcoin,” recalled Stu.

“This got me really interested in how Bitcoin script worked and [led] me to experimenting with Taproot and Bitcoin scripts…” he…