In this episode, Sunny Ray talks with Victor Cucos, a former aerospace engineer turned innovation funding consultant and co-builder of 3Commas, about his winding path into Bitcoin. Cucos describes his aerospace background working on landing gears and fault tolerant flight systems, and how that experience shaped his early intuition about distributed trust when he discovered Bitcoin around 2015, partly inspired by his twin sons mining Bitcoin at their high school. He and Sunny explore the Byzantine Generals problem, the evolution from double entry to triple entry accounting, and how blockchain networks solve trust issues that plagued corporations like Enron. Cucos explains his transition from building an index style crypto portfolio tool into full time work with 3Commas, a trading platform he helped grow from a bootstrapped side project run by two St. Petersburg developers into a company that recently closed a Series A round. The conversation blends technical depth with personal reflection, offering a builder's perspective on crypto's evolution and the unresolved trust problems it still aims to solve.
An aerospace engineer turned crypto builder unpacks Bitcoin's trust problem, the Byzantine Generals dilemma, and 3Commas' rise.
What was your path before you got into Bitcoin?
I'm a recycled aerospace engineer, I used to make landing gears and worked in automotive operations management. For the last 17 years I've focused on consulting, specifically innovation funding, R&D tax credits, grants, and risk capital for tech startups. That gave me access to full tech stacks and financial data across many verticals, so I developed expertise guiding young startups while constantly learning from bright people around me.
You mentioned fault tolerance systems from aerospace, can you explain what that means?
In aviation, aircraft have redundant sensors checking on each other, so if one or two fail there's still reliable data. Multiple layers of software and computing power analyze inputs to give a correct answer even when sensors disagree, because it's a matter of life and death. I always dreamed of scaling that kind of redundancy using inexpensive microcontrollers, which is essentially what happens in crypto networks.
Can you explain the Byzantine Generals problem?
It's a way of sifting through noise. A general is leading armies surrounding a fortress, and they can all communicate, but you don't know how loyal each faction is. How do you ensure everyone acts according to plan when you give a command? Solving that problem of coordinating trust among unreliable parties is what Satoshi's white paper addressed, and it's embodied in Bitcoin's design.
How does Bitcoin address the trust problem that double entry and even triple entry accounting couldn't fully solve?
With Bitcoin, every transaction is reflected across thousands of copies held by miners, not just a single auditor who could collude, as happened with Enron. There's a strong disincentive against a 51 percent attack because taking over that much of the network's hash power is economically unfavorable, even when hardware becomes cheap, which keeps the system honest without relying on any single trusted party.
How did your kids first introduce you to Bitcoin?
My twin boys came home one day saying they were mining Bitcoin on computers in their high school library. At first I thought it was some new version of Minecraft and didn't pay much attention. But it stuck with me, and around 2015 I started reading the Bitcoin white paper and looking into Ethereum while preparing grant applications for startups, and that's when I really went down the rabbit hole.
What is an index portfolio, and how did that lead you to 3Commas?
An index portfolio is a mix of multiple assets with different weights, similar to how portfolios like MSPI or Bletchley Indexes work, aiming for good risk adjusted returns. I wanted to build one myself, came across a beta project through my network called 3Commas, pushed the team to build an index portfolio feature, and eventually got involved full time helping fundraise and build partnerships.
How did 3Commas grow from a small side project into where it is today?
It started as a bootstrapped part time effort by two computer security graduates from St. Petersburg who were running a contract software business on the side. When we launched publicly in early 2017, the response was so significant they dropped their other client work entirely to focus on the platform, and we recently closed our Series A round, which CoinDesk and other outlets covered.
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