The story of Will
Building Systems in Solitude
Will was raised by his mother while his father was largely absent because of addiction and mental health struggles. He spent long periods alone, constructing elaborate worlds from Lego, K'Nex, and wooden train sets. The satisfaction came from making every piece fit into a complete system. That same impulse later appeared in mathematics, where he found creativity inside the many possible routes to a correct answer.
His talent became visible in college when he earned the highest Putnam exam score his university had recorded and received a mathematics department award. Yet the path was never only academic. Punk music, rebellion, and a resistance to authority also shaped his willingness to question accepted structures. For Will, technical work became compelling when it joined rigorous reasoning with the freedom to redesign a system from first principles.
Recovery, Mathematics, and a New Professional Identity
Before college, Will struggled seriously with drugs and alcohol and entered rehabilitation at sixteen. He described periods of running away, couch surfing, and organizing life around addiction. Recovery required more than stopping substance use. He had to learn how to live in his own skin, take responsibility for the harm he caused, and move through high school and college without the shortcut he had used for social comfort.
Mathematics provided structure, but even after graduating he felt uncertainty and impostor syndrome. He taught himself software engineering, wrote trading bots on GDAX, and eventually worked on a scalability team at Xandr before its acquisition by Microsoft. The career proved he could translate abstract problem solving into production systems. It also restored the creative loop he had loved as a child: examine constraints, combine components, and keep iterating until the whole system works.
Combining Exchange and Lending in Ammalgam
Ammalgam began when DeFi Summer prompted Will to study protocols, code, and research papers in depth. One paper led him to ask whether exchange and lending functions could be combined rather than managed as separate systems. The resulting protocol joins a decentralized exchange with permissionless lending in a single primitive. Market-making assets can earn swap fees and lending fees at the same time, while the design seeks to reduce dependence on gatekeeping mechanisms such as whitelists and external oracles.
Will said the team's models showed improved capital efficiency for major assets, but his motivation goes beyond a performance claim. He wants to recover the experimental spirit that drew him to DeFi before attention shifted toward easy speculation. Ammalgam is his attempt to use mathematical creativity and software engineering to expand what decentralized financial infrastructure can actually do.