After two years, I’m leaving Kiwi.

It’s a peaceful departure - Tim and I had different ideas on how to run the project. After long discussions, we decided that it’d be better to go all-in with one razor-sharp perspective instead of searching for lukewarm compromises. This means that Kiwi will be continued by Tim and I’m going 
to support the project from the sidelines.

Looking back, I’m proud of these two years as we took the road less traveled.

We bootstrapped and stayed independent, even when it made us scrappy. 
We prioritized open source and decentralization, even if it meant much more work. 
And we didn’t chase short-term trends that could distract us from our goals.

In 2023, when we met with Tim in Farcaster comments section, Kiwi was a bare-bones MVP. To share a link, you had to download our GitHub repo, buy an NFT on Mainnet and write a specific command in the terminal.

From then on, a lot has changed.

Our app has gone through countless iterations (OGs may remember Editor’s Picks and Banana News) and is now available on web, as an iOS app and Farcaster Mini App.

We hosted multiple writing contests with Gnosis, Lens, Purple, and Nouns, creating a space for communities to discuss their most pressing challenges.

These contests became quite a thing. Some of the winning submissions were printed in ETH Investors Club magazine, and one of the contests even got a prompt from Vitalik. A few months ago, when 
I saw Celo announcing they became an L2, they referenced the blogpost that Marek, Co-Founder 
of Celo, wrote for our contest.

In these two years, Tim and I also authored posts that made waves in the Ethereum community and gave talks at conferences - Devcon, Dappcon, Farcon, and others.

Since Kiwi is a social app, we’ve been very focused on building a strong community. We managed to gather a great group of Ethereum devs, founders, and operators, and many of them have become friends.

One of my favorite memories is our community dinner in Bangkok. 30 minutes before the event, 
a heavy tropical rain started. The traffic became crazy, and I worried that no one would come, especially since there were so many other side events to chose from.

But then, little by little, people - soaking wet - started coming. We had a great night, ate fantastic Korean food and when the meetup ended, a few of us kept talking outside the restaurant and on our way home, because we had so many shared interests to explore.

And although Kiwi has not reached millions of users (yet!), whenever I told people at an ETH conference that I work at Kiwi, at least a few said “Oh, I know Kiwi! Look, I have your app on my home screen”. And they were always surprised that “we are just two guys”.

It’s been an intense two years, and I’d like to thank everyone who helped us on the way. Building in consumer crypto is hard, especially when you’re bootstrapping, but this path became much more enjoyable with all amazing people who supported our journey.

And although I won’t work on Kiwi anymore, I’m always going to support it, too. And I am confident that Tim will keep developing Kiwi until it becomes a household name.

What’s next? I have a few ideas, and some friends even shared some offers. But I haven’t made any decisions yet. So, if you have any good ideas, DM me on Telegram.

Mac from Kiwi