About
Who I am
I’m Roberto Santacroce Martins — software engineer, entrepreneur, father of three and, in my spare time, someone who insists on asking questions that may have no answer.
I was born in Brazil, live in Madrid and have been working with technology for over twenty years. My career spans three continents — from telecoms and stock exchanges to Bitcoin and stablecoins. I currently run Santacroce Tech, a software development consultancy focused on blockchain technology, scalability and decentralisation.
Career path
I started in 1999 at Austin Asis in São Paulo, building stock technical and fundamental analysis tools and market data distribution systems. From there I spent seven years in Los Angeles at Brastel, designing billing systems for prepaid and post-paid telecom services and working with globally distributed teams.
Back in Brazil, I joined B3 (the Brazilian stock exchange), where I architected the Global Pricing System and billing products, worked closely with high-frequency trading infrastructure and explored GPU processing for latency optimisation.
In 2013 I co-founded the Bitcoin Center NYC — one of the first major Bitcoin hubs in New York — where I designed exchange backends, order book matchers and custody services. From that point on, Bitcoin became the thread running through my career.
At BRQ Digital Solutions, as CTO, I managed roughly 2,000 developers and led digital transformation projects for major financial institutions including Santander, Itau, Sofisa, Nasdaq and FINRA. At Transfero Group, as Chief Blockchain Officer, I researched, designed and implemented BRZ — Brazil’s first stablecoin — along with a multilanguage algorithmic trading platform and market-making bots.
I then co-founded Anicca Research, focused on cryptocurrency research, distributed systems and data analysis.
Today, alongside Santacroce Tech, I serve as CTO of CS Digital Ventures (high-performance computing in Texas), advisor at Preservaland (environmental conservation with smart contracts) and strategic consultant at Chap19/Imbued (digital health in London).
What I build
My personal projects revolve around local-first software, Bitcoin and tools that respect user privacy:
- EEditor — Native text editor for Apple with a built-in Lisp database, syntax highlighting for 24+ languages and executable code blocks.
- EELisp — Lisp interpreter for personal data management, inspired by dBASE III and Lotus Agenda.
- Qvault — Automatic detection and redaction of sensitive personal data for legal professionals. Everything local, nothing leaves the machine.
- Finance Tracker — Personal finance tracker in Tauri/Rust, local-first.
- BIP300 / Drivechain — Contribution to the Bitcoin sidechain ecosystem via Hashrate Escrows and Blind Merged Mining.
Open source contributions
I contribute to the Bitcoin ecosystem — Drivechain (BIP 300/301 for sidechains) and Layer Two Labs projects. I also had the honour of contributing to the ZeroMQ library (libzmq C++).
Tools
I write in Java, Rust, C/C++, Swift, Common Lisp, GDScript, Solidity and TypeScript. I enjoy things that run locally, open protocols and software that doesn’t need permission to exist.
Languages
Portuguese (native), English (fluent), Spanish (professional).
This blog
Pensaduras is my open notebook. Philosophy, technology, journal entries and everything that fits between one question and the next. The name comes from a Portuguese pun between “pensar” (to think) and “duras” (hard ones) — questions that weigh heavy.