Every year it is increasingly difficult to get these updates out in time. So it's a bit weird to be writing this 2024 year in review post while it's already halfway into 2025. I do like being able to write down my thoughts and reflections of the past year, so I'm publishing this review regardless.

In my previous year in review I wrote that 2023 had been a rather stable year with clear upward trajectory, in business as well as personally. That place of stability had been a very welcome change from the hectic years before. And this has allowed me to start focusing on some parts of life that had been neglected.

💰 Revoke.cash & Entrepreneurship

It's been over 2 years now since I decided to work on Revoke.cash full-time, and 2024 has been the best year yet. We crossed the threshold of over 100 different crypto networks supported and grew the team beyond myself. We received a lot of support and public goods funding, and shipped loads of new features.

Rebranding

While the clip-art logo that Revoke has had for the past years has served us well, it was time to retire the old brand in favour of one that wasn't made by me in about 10 minutes time.

For the new brand and logo we worked together with Richard Schumann, a Berlin-based designer that has provided us with very high quality work and an enjoyable collaboration. As part of the rebrand we also redesigned the browser extension, that was in dire need of some UI love.

Batch Revoking

One of the most requested features since Revoke's inception is the infamous batch revoke. And while our answer has always been that it is not possible to revoke multiple approvals in a single transaction, we have finally launched a UI overhaul that makes queuing up these individual transactions much easier.

And with native account abstraction around the corner for Ethereum, chances are that it will finally also be possible to combine multiple revokes into a single transaction.

Risk Indicators

Another feature that had been on the backlog for quite some time was better risk indicators to offer guidance for which token approvals might be higher risk or even outright malicious.

For this feature we partnered with ScamSniffer and Webacy, and we've also built our own risk engine. I want to continue building out this risk engine to help users gain better insights into their token approvals.

Revenue

2024 has been a great year for public goods funding across the crypto ecosystem. We've received large grants from Optimism's Retro Funding, Gitcoin, Octant and ENS. This has allowed us to hire some part time contractors to help me out with the company.

While revenue has been great, it is uncertain what 2025 will bring, which is unfortunately the nature of the business model that I'm trying to pursue as a public good. It may prove difficult, but I do want to try to continue building Revoke as a public good.

I've chatted with people at Optimism, and unfortunately it looks like Revoke will not be eligible for the next wave(s) of Optimism Retro Funding. I am grateful to them for their support in 2024, and it will be a big challenge to find a replacement for that revenue stream in 2025.

👨‍🎨 Side Projects

Side projects have always been a big part of what I do, but in the past years they have been becoming less prominent. Especially after Revoke.cash graduated from side project to main project. But some projects are still holding on strong and some new projects have emerged.

CashScript

As I wrote in my previous year in review post, the Truffle Suite of developer tooling was sunset late 2023, and with it my popular open source truffle-related tools. So while I used to work on several open source developer tools in the past, only one remains: CashScript.

As a reminder, CashScript is a project that I created in 2019 as part of my Master's Thesis. Over the years it grew to the primary way to create smart contracts on Bitcoin Cash. And while my main focus is on the Ethereum ecosystem, it is great to see that CashScript is still growing, and I still dedicate some weekly time to it together with Mathieu Geukens who has been a part of the team since 2023.

Its usage has kept rising in 2024, and while the BCH ecosystem is only a fraction of the size of Ethereum, it is very cool and rewarding to see that CashScript is being used to create dozens of novel DeFi applications, like derivatives platform AnyHedge and stablecoin Moria.

ForestComply

Another side project that I've started this year is ForestComply. This is a product that came about after I spoke with my uncle Albert, who runs Crafting Markets, a company that imports and trades cacao beans.

The EU has developed new regulations surrounding the importing of cacao and coffee beans, timber, rubber, and several other commodities. Central to this new European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is that traders need to provide documentation that shows that their commodities do not come from deforested areas.

To help traders comply with this new regulation, my friend Dries and I started ForestComply, a product that uses open source satellite data to detect deforestation in common origins of cacao and coffee. Our aim with this product was to provide a fairly priced usage-based alternative to some of the overly expensive solutions on the market.

We spoke to potential users and developed a quite complete solution, and we even booked a week in a cabin to make sure we get all the important features implemented. But when the new regulation ended up being postponed by at least another year, we lost the motivation to continue working on it without a clear path to revenue.

We decided to shelve the project with the option to pick it back up if the regulation does end up being implemented, but we are dealing with the European Union, and with the current delays it would not surprise me if the regulation gets pushed even further or even completely removed.

💪 Quality of Life

The past years have been very much focused on work: first my salaried & freelance work, then building my own companies. As I've shared in my previous year in review posts, I've been gradually trying to find more balance in my life. And because Revoke has been steadily growing, I've been able to spend some more energy on other parts of life that had been somewhat neglected.

Around-the-World Trip

Back in 2019 my wife Kiki and I flew around the world twice, which is an experience we've wanted to repeat for a long time, but never had the opportunity to. Because doing another long trip around the world is something that we've wanted to do for so long, we're very happy that we managed to make it happen in 2024.

We started our trip in February, which was exactly the right time - or maybe even a bit too late - to leave cold Amsterdam behind. Our plan was to just book one way tickets and figure out the next destination along the way. The first stop was driving through the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico.

From there we continued to Hawaii, a place that we also first visited in 2019 on our previous round-the-world trip. When we first visited Hawaii we were still students, so our budget didn't allow for a whole lot of exploration. We made up for that this time around and saw a lot of Oahu in two weeks.

Surprisingly, we were able to get tickets from Hawaii to Melbourne, Australia for just $250 (for a 12 hour flight), so that decision was easily made. We planned to spend a few weeks in Australia, driving from Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane.

We quickly realised that Australia warrants a much longer stay, so we ended up staying in the country for 5 weeks, which still did not seem nearly enough.

After Australia we got in touch with a friend that we met in Hawaii on our previous trip in 2019 who had since moved to Indonesia. He told us to come over to Sumbawa, so that was our next stop. Unfortunately he ended up not replying once we got to the island, so we didn't get to meet up with him.

Nonetheless, we met some really amazing locals in Sumbawa that made us feel right at home and even invited us into their homes and cooked some delicious meals for us. The nature in Sumbawa was also beautiful, but overall we did miss a bit of the bustle of our other, busier destinations.

In the mean time we had gotten in touch with Håkon, another friend that we'd met on our previous trip in 2019, who happened to also be traveling through South East Asia at the same time. We decided to fly to Bali to hang out with him, and we had a blast with him and met a bunch of other awesome people as well.

From Bali we flew to Singapore to meet family that I had never met before, before making the trip back to Europe with stops in Turkey and Macedonia to visit Kiki's family and our friends Stef and Ana.

This trip is something we'd wanted to do for a long time, so I'm grateful that we had the opportunity to do so in 2024. I was able to continue working on Revoke while travelling, although not as much as I was planning to.

I would like to be able to do another trip like this in the future, but it remains a challenge to combine long travels with work.

Health & Fitness

When I was still studying, I exercised a lot and was in great shape. I cared about eating healthy and I rowed 5 times a week. But in the past years, I had slowly stopped caring about fitness. The pandemic played a role in this, but I also just didn't really have a lot of motivation to work out.

Knowing that it was hard to get back into the habit of working out, I decided to give personal training a go. I was introduced a personal trainer in Amsterdam and I started training with him twice a week after getting back from our travels.

This has made a big impact on my day to day life: I feel much fitter and healthier, and I have a lot more energy to spend on other aspects of life. After experiencing the difference that a relatively small amount of exercise can make, I will make a more conscious effort to keep that going.

Social & Hobbies

Another field where I've been looking to improve is spending more quality time with people I care about. So that means more dedicated time with family, friends and my wife. In 2024, we made an effort to be more aware of this and go out of our way to plan that time and also meet up spontaneously more often.

Because we travelled quite a bit this year, it wasn't always possible to see our loved ones as much as we'd initially had intended. But during our travels, we did make an effort to visit friends across the world where possible, such as our friends in Mexico, Macedonia and the United States.

This year I also decided to make an effort to play more board games, which is a hobby that I've been wanting to get into more. So gnidan inspired me to install the bgstats app, which I've been using to keep track of my board games. I've been having a lot of fun and I'm making a conscious effort to try to meet up for board games more often.

2025

In 2024 Revoke.cash has done well, which has allowed me to focus a bit on things outside of work. While I've reached all of my fitness and travel goals, I still do want to spend more time with people I care about.

2025 looks like it may not be as smooth sailing from a business perspective. So I hope to be able to continue making Revoke.cash a success without taking away from the positive steps I have been taking to improve my life outside of work.