Scarce City

Context

I was the first hire at Scarce City, a Bitcoin-powered marketplace connecting global collectors with Bitcoin art, collectibles, and goods. As Head of Business Operations from January 2022 to August 2023, I owned the day-to-day of a live Bitcoin marketplace and built the operating process a young company did not have yet.

The problem up close

Every marketplace lives or dies on trust between people who have never met. That trust is not one feature. It is liquidity so listings clear, pricing that feels fair, provenance and authenticity so a buyer believes what they are bidding on, reputation so a seller is worth trusting, and support and fulfillment so the deal actually completes. Watching those pieces succeed and fail in a live Bitcoin market taught me more than any theory of commerce could.

What I took from it

The lesson that stuck: commerce is downstream of trust, and trust is downstream of identity and reputation. A payment is the easy part. Knowing who you are dealing with, and what their history is worth, is the hard part, and Bitcoin had almost no shared infrastructure for it.

What it influenced

This is one of the clearest through-lines into Bitcoin Culture Hub. The company treats Bitcoin commerce as a trust and reputation problem first, because that is the part I watched matter most.