Alexander Leishman 🇺🇸

Every Bitcoin exchange should have Public Financials and Proof of Reserves.

We’re publishing @River’s 2025 financials to further our mission of building the world’s most trusted financial institution. We will continue to publish our financials annually.

There is often a knee-jerk reaction against data centers in space, but the more you dig into it the more the numbers look like they work if a number of difficult, but not impossible, engineering challenges are solved.

Many people list cooling as a major blocker to space data centers, but this is already solved by using large radiators.

Additionally, there are technologies like the liquid droplet radiator that could reduce radiator mass by up to 7x (see diagram for design variants). The general idea is that you simply yeet the coolant into space and catch it again once it has cooled off, using the surface of the liquid itself to radiate heat instead of a heavy network of pipes and metal. A droplet of coolant with a diameter of 1 μm can theoretically go from 227 C to -21 C in two seconds given the proper conditions.

A major open challenge with liquid droplet radiators is preventing coolant loss.

Not sure if @elonmusk 's team is working on this, but would be curious to know if anyone else is.

We just published the November 2026 @River Proof of Reserves. Don't trust, verify.

At River a culture of security and paranoia has been in our DNA since day 1. Often that meant doing things the hard way instead of moving fast.

For example, we have always operated our own custody system. This meant doing the work to be a regulated financial institution in our infancy instead of delegating the backend to companies like Prime Trust.

We have always worked to minimize reliance on third parties where possible, and as our ability to build software systems accelerates we continue to delete both software and corporate dependencies.

We budget a substantial % of our engineering resources every year to tackle tech debt and invest in security hardening. This means moving slower, but having confidence in our foundation and doing right by our clients.

I personally give the company security training to every new employee who joins River and we constantly drive a culture of vigilance at the company. We tell every employee at River that their job is to be a security professional.

Security isn't a team or a "thing" you do. It's a culture of extreme paranoia and humility - never feeling like you're secure enough and always trying to do better.

This is the bell curve meme, except the right tail has yet to fully manifest (it will).