About

Introduction

EarthBucks is created by Ryan X. Charles LLC, which is wholly owned by Ryan X. Charles, an American entrepreneur.

My History

After learning to program at age 10, I later graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a double major in physics and mathematics, and then spent six years in physics graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis before quitting in 2013 to work full-time on Bitcoin. I joined BitPay in September 2013 as a software engineer. BitPay offered the ability to accept part of my salary in Bitcoin, which I embraced by becoming the first person to accept my full salary in Bitcoin at BitPay, and probably the first in the world.

I worked on the full-stack BitPay software in node.js/Mongo (callback pyramids and undefined is not a function), and transitioned into working on what would become bitcore, a set of open-source tools for working with Bitcoin.

After helping to start Copay, the BitPay wallet, later renamed to just “BitPay”, I left BitPay to join reddit in September 2014 as the world’s first officially titled “cryptocurrency engineer”. At reddit, I worked on fullnode, what would have been the reddit cryptocurrency wallet, and “reddit notes”, a project that would have put reddit cryptocurrency into the hands of every reddit user. Unfortunately, reddit was experiencing a lot of turmoil at the time, including the resignation of two CEOs, and I was laid off and the project was never finished.

I joined BitGo as a software engineer and worked on the full-stack BitGo wallet software in node.js/Mongo. While at BitGo, I wrote a popular article about decentralizing reddit that gave me a hint that I should start my own company. So I left BitGo to found what was at first called Datt, and later Yours.org (now owned by unrelated entities), a decentralized social network that used micropayments to reward content creators.

Yours.org would go on to get traction with a small but dedicated user base. We raised two rounds of funding, including a $1.5 million raise that was led by Bitmain. I was involved in the Bitcoin block size wars of 2017 and very publicly switched the company’s technology from Bitcoin to Litecoin that year due to fees. After the launch of Bitcoin Cash, I again switched the underlying technology, this time to Bitcoin Cash. Yours.org was the first app to use Bitcoin Cash in 2017.

After running this project on Bitcoin Cash for a few months, it became clear that there was a need for a developer tool to do micropayments on Bitcoin Cash, so I pivoted Yours.org to create Money Button, a “simple payment system”, which was basically an entire wallet inside a button that made it very easy for developers to copy+paste a wallet into their apps.

I was again involved in another blockchain war in late 2018 as Bitcoin Cash would split to create Bitcoin SV. I decided to support Bitcoin SV, and again my company was the first to adopt a new blockchain, this time Bitcoin SV.

Money Button achieved greater success than Yours.org and was ultimately acquired by The Bayesian Group in 2020.

I left The Bayesian Group in early 2021, which by then had been renamed to Fabriik. After that, I worked on various small projects, but mostly took a lot of time off to recover from the stress of running a startup and reflect on what I wanted to do next.

I spent some time researching AI and building AI apps, and in early 2024, after creating Artintellica, a social network for AI agents, it became clear to me there was still a need for small casual transactions in the range of 1 US cent to 5 US dollars to provide an alternative to monthly subscriptions in the AI revolution. I decided to pivot my emphasis from AI back to blockchain to create EarthBucks to solve this problem.

My intention with EarthBucks is not just to create a new blockchain for small casual transactions, but also to create new AI apps that uniquely leverage this way of making payments for experiences not otherwise possible with credit cards.

Fund Raising

EarthBucks is owned by Ryan X. Charles LLC, but I plan to create a new corporation to own the IP after launch. The new corporation will raise money. If you are interested in investing in this project, or if you are interested in working together on the business in some other respect, please feel free to contact me at company@ryanxcharles.com.