Coinz

Coinz was announced before it existed. In December 2021 my little bot company Aqua Solutions had exactly one focus on its site: an economy bot called Coinz, marked coming soon, promising 15 minigames at release and one day a stock market. I had no idea I was describing the next three years of my life.

The first version was Python. Then I rebuilt it in JavaScript, because I wanted the language websites are built with, then again and again until it was fully TypeScript. Six rebuilds in total, and every one of them was me pouring everything I had just learned back into the same idea.

What it became was a full economy simulation inside Discord: over 15 minigames from blackjack to poker to crash, 30 stocks and 40 cryptocurrencies with regularly updated prices, businesses that could employ other players, farming plots, a premium tier. Around 100,000 lines of TypeScript, sharded across servers and running with almost zero errors. I am still proud of how stable that codebase was.

Coinz is where I learned everything at once. How to code, first of all. Then how to scale, how infrastructure behaves under real load and my first marketing and sales lessons, because a bot does not reach 700,000 users on its own. At its peak around 10,000 people used it every single day, month after month.

It also taught me a business lesson the honest way: almost nobody pays for a Discord bot, and a subscription makes them angrier still. Coinz was never going to fund itself, and accepting that early freed me to treat it as what it really was, the best education I could have gotten at that age.

Eventually I stepped away to focus on new things and let it run. For a full year Coinz took care of itself and grew from 700,000 users to 1.35 million without a single update, which told me more about the engineering than any code review could. But the support requests never stopped, and by early 2025 the choice was between a project that had stopped teaching me and Enkryptify, which had just started to. I shut Coinz down at 1.35 million users.

Turning it off was hard. It is still the project I am most sentimental about, and everything I have built since stands on top of it.