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Dear readers,
In this week’s edition, which is for our crypto and blockchain enthusiasts, we follow the US based Macedonian Jordan Stojanovski, who is a financial veteran whose journey has led him deep into Web3. At 60, Jordan talks about code and DeFi the way some people talk about music - something to obsess over, return to, and never quite exhaust. His path loops through succesffull HFT trading algorithams, fintech ventures, ownership and sale of jordan.com domain and legal battles with Nike/Air Jordan, unfinished doctorates, failed startups, early Bitcoin experiments, and patent-pending hardware hacks, ultimately landing on zero-knowledge cryptography and decentralized finance, and becoming one of the biggest stars and hackathon winners on the global ETH events.
We also cover regional developments in tech and innovation, from Bulgaria to Croatia, spotlighting AI-powered creative tools, autonomous systems, and new approaches to mobile gaming.
Our usual “Rumor Has It” section tracks subtle trends across the IT industry, while the Ecosystem Take explores challenges and opportunities in the Balkan startup scene, including funding dynamics, scalability, and structural bottlenecks, with insights from industry insiders such as WeAreDevelopers’ own Adnan Pavlovic.
Enjoy!
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs
The Macedonian hedge fund veteran’s second life in web3
Jordan Stojanovski
At 60, Jordan Stojanovski speaks about code the way some people speak about music - as something you return to, obsess over, and never quite exhaust. His story moves from Ljubljana lecture halls to Michigan graduate labs, from New York hedge fund offices to Ethereum hackathons across the world. It never unfolds as a straight line - but loops through unfinished doctorates, failed startups, forgotten Bitcoin wallets, and hardware experiments that were simply too early.
“I moved to the US to continue with graduate school. I lived in Michigan for 10 years, but because of my work in the financial industry, it made sense to move to New York. It was also fun to be in the city at that age,” he told me over coffee at the Westfield World Trade Center in Manhattan, where we talked about his past and plans for the future.
Before New York, before hedge funds, before DAOs, for Jordan, there was mathematics. As a student in Ljubljana, he competed in Math, Physics, and Computer Science. He later earned a Master’s in Computer Science at Wayne State University in Detroit and continued toward a PhD at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“I continued to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for PhD and dropped out of it when I was almost done, for a business opportunity that eventually did not work out.” he recalls. That unfinished doctorate would become a recurring motif in his life. It wasn’t regret, and it served a fork in the road that led him closer to markets and eventually back to cryptography.
“I left my PhD almost at the very end, but at the same time I had started a trading company and I was torn between the two. There were investors involved, but I wasn’t ready, and that company also failed,” he says. At that time, he was suspended between academia and entrepreneurship, between theory and capital - with neither path fully materialized.
Early encounters with cryptography
The doctoral work itself revolved around cryptography. And in the mid-1990s, he encountered one of the field’s pioneers, the famous cryptographer David Chaum.
“Back then, in 1995, David Chaum was a professor in California who was talking about these concepts, digital money, and so on.. Topics such as zero-knowledge proofs, which were pretty unfamiliar to the wider public.
Chaum was already discussing digital cash and cryptographic privacy decades before blockchain became fashionable. At the time, the macroeconomic climate felt different, Jordan adds.
“And at that time, the economy was different, somehow more responsible, there was more trust in money.” Back then, digital money sounded more like an intellectual curiosity. Today, however, it sounds like inevitability just waiting to happen.
Jordan’s early professional years oscillated between hardcore computer science and financial engineering. He wrote a Prolog compiler for the Jožef Stefan Institute. He developed automated trading platforms - both commercial and proprietary, and he modeled markets by borrowing abstractions from physics and mathematics.
“I developed several tools for automated trading, and I borrowed a lot of ideas from Physics and Math in modeling market behaviors - that was fun and profitable.”
Eventually, he co-ran a small hedge fund, and at 45, he retired. But retirement, in Jordan’s vocabulary, does not mean withdrawal. “Once in a while I pick up interesting projects.” But now, that once in a while has actually become to be much ore.
The art of patience: domains and crypto
One of the earliest signals of his strategic patience predates crypto entirely: the domain jordan.com. “I had a huge list of available domains around 1990, but a friend convinced me against getting into it. Yet I got jordan.com because Jordan is my name.”
He held onto it for nearly 15 years. He parked it with an advertising agency. Then he built an advertising aggregator to demonstrate revenue potential - not to create a company, but to increase negotiating leverage.
“I realized I had to build an advertising aggregator to maximize the revenue and so I did, but not with an intent to run it as a business, but merely to improve the perceived value of the domain.” Eventually, patience paid off. Nike came knocking, and he sold.
That same patience would later define his approach to crypto. Jordan downloaded the Bitcoin repository and read the whitepaper in late 2010. “I downloaded the Bitcoin repo and paper in late 2010, and unfortunately failed to believe it will take off, based on its instability and usage complication.” He remembers the early crypto meetups.
“In that period we gathered with crypto enthusiasts, talked about the topic, examined rigs, Bitcoin was actively traded, and I even remember when the price was just 70 cents.” And he knew about Ethereum before launch. “I learned about Ethereum early. It was supposed to launch in 2015, but together with a few other enthusiasts we knew even before the launch.”
Experiments and early failures
In 2014, he attempted to build a trading platform called Liberty Security. However, funding didn’t come, and the idea stalled. He stepped back from it again in 2015.
But crypto has a way of pulling people back. Around 2016, the first serious DAO and DeFi experiments reignited his interest. “I dropped it again until 2016 when I saw the first prospects of DAO and DeFi. I built many ‘toys’ without thinking about how to commercialize them, all as a hobby.”
He means it literally - toys. “I built a device capable of signing Bitcoin transactions; I wanted to make something like a burner wallet… I also work with electronics as a hobby and created such a hardware piece.”
He built a hardware device capable of signing Bitcoin transactions - an early concept of a burner wallet. “I started showing it around, but there was little interest; perhaps it was still too early.”
However, a neighbor mentioned the project to a CEO that he knew. Conversations started, and at the same time, a new crypto exchange concept emerged. “While chatting with a neighbor, he told the CEO of the company where he worked, and together with a few partners, we started something new - a crypto exchange for trading.”
The agreement was simple: help him with his device, and he would help build the exchange. “For three years, the exchange was in demo mode, trading simulated clients, but due to regulations, it was hard to push forward.” Regulation, not technology, was the problem.
“I believe the main obstacles are not technical. The obstacles are the bad actors, trying to stop the progress.”
Thus, in his view, Web3 is not just a tech stack, but rather a counterweight. Furthermore, he sees decentralized finance as more than speculation. “Not just as a monetary system, but also as a slew of financial tools for lending, exchange, trading, hedging etc. in a more honest and fair manner.”
And yet, for all the ideology, he insists his primary driver is simpler. “I have to admit, entertainment is my main personal driver. I simply love my profession and regardless of financial gain, I am enjoying tinkering with it.”
Zero-knowledge cryptography and hackathons
Today, much of his focus is on zero-knowledge cryptography. One of his recent hackathon projects, Sarma (if Sillicon Valley’s biggest company can be named Apple, who are we to complicate things?) , won multiple awards at ETHGlobal Istanbul. “Sarma is a general-purpose tool which will facilitate privacy and private execution on EVMs.”
Blockchains, by design, are transparent. “Blockchains are fully transparent, and when there is a need for privacy, Zero-Knowledge cryptography can help.” He frames the problem precisely: on-chain execution is slow and inefficient because of consensus duplication, and off-chain computation needs verifiable proofs.
“But if someone can prove that they did certain execution as described, the blockchain can provide cooperation in an honest, sovereign, and incorruptible manner, in a private manner if needed.”
There are already privacy-focused chains - Aleo, Aztec, Mina - but Ethereum’s virtual machine dominates capital allocation. “Sarma will enable private execution on EVMs, with minimal overhead.”
In zero-knowledge cryptography, he sounds almost childlike. “In ZK I am like a kid in a candy store, and I don’t exactly know in which direction I am going, but I like its applications… as well as tools.”
He is reading about ZK machine learning. He has built AI-related hacks before. “I learn as I go… I am spending a lot of time learning ZK math and I’m sure something will come out of that.”
If there is one dimension that humanizes this otherwise highly technical journey, it is his collaboration with his daughter at hackathons. “Children don’t usually listen to their parents. This changed it a little in our case, and I enjoy spending time with her in such a setting.”
They are opposites. “She is fast and bold, I overanalyze everything before I even start, but together these differences compensate each other.” The generational exchange rejuvenates him. “Yes, and my mind becomes younger as a result. She jumps into everything fearlessly and I go ‘let me try it, too’.”
After decades in an industry built on confidentiality and trade secrets, he now publishes his hacks publicly. “I am 60 years old and I lived in the old world, where everything was confidential. Everything that I did was a ‘trade secret’ and I am so happy to be able to share everything now.”
What he does today, he hesitates to call a career. “I am not sure what I do is a career – it’s entertainment.”
Check Jordan’s Trophy wall at https://jordan-public.github.io/
But there is something more deliberate beneath the playfulness. A return to unfinished equations and revisiting of conversations from 1995 about zero-knowledge proofs - a loop closed.
When I ask him how he sees Web3 evolving, he is optimistic but pragmatic. “Web3 is in its early stages, but it is showing very fast technological growth. I am still surprised the mass adoption is not here yet… It is here to stay, for sure.”
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Across the region…
The investment group Neo Ventures, led by Bulgarian entrepreneur Pavel Ezekiev, has started 2026 with a new fund, three new partners, and three completed deals, with a fourth nearing closure. The new fund, NeoAutonomy, brings together familiar names and focuses on autonomous systems, drones, and technologies reshaping transport and logistics across Europe.
The Croatian Business Angels Network (CBAN) has completed its fifth investment since launch, backing startup PromptWise with a total of €400K in an angel funding round. The investment was led by CBAN members Damir Sabol and Mihovil Barančić, alongside angel investor Miomir Kecmanović. PromptWise, launched in 2025 by Mateo Starcevic Filipovic and Daniel Riley, develops tools for the creative use of AI in image and video production.
Bulgarian entrepreneurs Deyan Vitanov and Petar Dobrev are developing an alternative to traditional app distribution platforms such as Apple App Store and Google Play, aiming to reshape mobile gaming globally. Their project called Jest is built on Rich Communication Services (RCS), a next-generation successor to SMS integrated directly into mobile operating systems. The platform allows users to access and play games through text messages, using an open protocol that supports rich media features such as images, video, and reactions.
Prague-based Choice has raised $7.1 million in a Series A round led by Alea Capital, with participation from Reflex Capital, Smartlink, and J&T Ventures, bringing total funding to $11.6 million. The company is building an all-in-one operating system for independent restaurants, combining ordering, payments, reservations, and analytics in a single platform, and now serves more than 30,000 restaurants across nine European markets.
Surveily’s founders
Wrocław-based startup Surveily, which develops edge AI for industrial safety, has raised €2.5 million in a Series A round led by Momenta, with participation from Look AI Ventures. The company converts existing CCTV systems into real-time safety monitoring platforms that run entirely on-premise, eliminating the need for cloud connectivity.
First Concepts, a startup developing an AI-powered workspace for creative professionals, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding less than a year after launch. The round was led by Araya Ventures, with participation from Antler and several industry investors. The company is focused on helping creative teams streamline early-stage project development, particularly when managing multiple pitches.
The First Concepts founding team
Rumor has it…
After last week’s whispers, the story doesn’t stop there. Word now is that similar companies across the region, particularly in Serbia and Bulgaria, are facing much the same situation. If that holds true, it suggests the IT industry across the region isn’t dealing with isolated issues, but something far more systemic quietly unfolding beneath the surface.
More tech rumors? Reach out at [email protected]
The Ecosystem take…
Adnan Pavlovic, regional director at WeAreDevelopers
IT Logs: How sustainable is Balkan startup funding without EU grants and diaspora capital?
Adnan Pavlovic: It is too early to tell about a fully mature startup funding ecosystem in the Balkans. Venture funds do exist across the region, and when you talk to young founders, many are still unaware of them and rely more on angel investors or personal networks. EU programs and diaspora capital, therefore, continue to play an important catalytic role. At the same time, the region can’t be viewed in isolation. Europe needs the Balkans as much as the Balkans need Europe.
IT Logs: Are Balkan startups building scalable global products or relying on outsourcing?
Historically, the region built its reputation on strong engineering services and outsourcing. Now we see a shift toward product-driven entrepreneurship. More startups are aiming to build scalable products rather than purely service-based businesses. Organizations such as mine - WeAreDevelopers, actively promote an entrepreneurial mindset by giving startups visibility and access to international networks from the very beginning.
IT Logs: What structural bottlenecks most limit the region’s tech ecosystem growth?
While the Balkans produce strong engineering talent, startups often still struggle to access the later-stage funding and experienced scaling support for their expansion. Still, skilled professionals continue to move to larger technology hubs in search of broader opportunities.
Upcoming events in the region…
Adriatics Tech Summit 2026 - March 30 - April 1, Sarajevo, BiH
iOSKonf26 - May 4 - 6, Skopje, N. Macedonia
Podim - May 11 - 13, Maribor, Slovenia
SaaStanak 2026 - May 25 - 27, Sibenik, Croatia
Southeast Europe AI Summit - May 28 - 29, Novi Sad, Serbia
