About Me
Most of what I do comes back to one question: is this actually any good, and does it hold up? At JPMorgan Chase I asked it as a commercial credit underwriter, on multi-million-dollar deals for companies doing $20M to $500M in revenue. I asked it again running my family's cosmetics business, a $600K-a-year operation across four locations, this time on the hook for the numbers myself. And I put the same question to AI, autonomous systems, and blockchain as they emerged.
Finance & Credit
My path into finance ran through the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin, one of the top business programs in the country. From there I went to JPMorgan Chase, where I underwrote middle-market credit and built the financial models behind deal execution. The real education, though, was seeing how businesses actually run, and I got that up close, across industries from heavy machinery and alcohol distribution to data centers and restaurants, touring their operations in person.
Running a Business
Eventually I left to take the opportunity to run one myself, stepping in to lead my family's cosmetics company across four retail locations and an online store. Underwriting had taught me to read a business from the outside. Running one taught me the rest: what it actually takes to keep the doors open, make payroll, and hold the margins together.
On-Chain Finance
My training is finance, a degree from McCombs and credit work at JPMorgan, but underneath it I have always been pulled toward economics: how money moves, how rates get set, how credit gets priced. So when Ethereum showed up, I did not read it as a trading fad. I read it the way I read a borrower, asking whether it was legitimate and whether it would hold up. That question is what pulled me in, from the ConsenSys Academy Blockchain Developer Bootcamp, where I built a marketplace dApp on Ethereum, to running my own Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes. What kept me there was the part most people skip past: where the technology actually meets banking, lending, and interest rates.
That intersection is DeFi, and the same credit and rate frameworks I used underwriting middle-market borrowers map cleanly onto on-chain lending, collateral, and yield. The clearest signal of where it is heading is BlackRock's BUIDL fund, which I broke down in a piece on how tokenized Treasuries are becoming the risk-free rate for on-chain finance, the point where traditional banking, interest rates, and DeFi collateral converge. That is the research I actually care about, and I keep publishing it at ortegarodrigo.com alongside work on Layer 2 economics and tokenized real-world assets.
I do not just write about it. I build it. A payment-settlement system I designed for AI agents to transact on-chain took second place out of 221 teams at Circle's Agentic Commerce hackathon, which is exactly where my finance side and my AI work meet: money that can move itself.
Applied AI & Autonomous Systems
The same instinct runs through my work in AI, which I pursue through my own venture, Digital Node Technologies. It spans applied AI across the board: autonomous systems, software development, and building AI agents into real workflows and applications. A recent example sits right up the road, where I brought my family's wedding venue online, building its website and automating the operations behind it. Much of it runs on OpenClaw, my framework of choice and essentially an operating system for AI agents. The work holds up under competition, with a first-place finish at an OpenClaw hackathon for an autonomous blockchain scanner and an autonomous drone platform I presented at NVIDIA GTC in San Jose, California. I write about what I learn as I go.
Off the Screen
When I step away from the screen, I am usually on the land. Over the last few years I have turned a raw stretch of Texas into a working homestead: clearing the ground, digging ponds, and fencing and building out pasture for cattle. I did much of the construction myself, learning the trades as I went, including the house I live in today. Mornings start with a run and year-round training for Hyrox. The physical work, on the land and in training, is some of the most satisfying I do.
Same Job, Different Seats
It has all been the same job, really, just from different seats. Whether I am underwriting a company, running one, or building the technology behind one, I am doing what I always have: working out whether the thing in front of me is any good, and whether it will hold up.