Quitting a 9-to-5 job in marketing to join the volatile crypto world, Steph, the CEO of Peach Bitcoin, shares her personal journey with AltCoinDesk.
From a marketing role in FMCG companies, paving her daily routine amidst KPIs, meetings, slide decks, user experience, and communication built her core, but it failed to conquer her heart.
“I learned a lot about user experience and communication, but I never felt connected to what I was building. I’ve always cared about making technology feel more human. That curiosity about how design shapes trust ended up becoming a big part of why I was drawn to Bitcoin later on,” she said.
She didn’t set out to be a crypto genius. She studied business and marketing, worked in marketing roles at FMCG companies, and then in fintech and product management. These experiences built her strong grasp of crypto.
“My job was to bridge the gap between developers and users, to translate complex systems into something people could actually enjoy using. That experience shaped how I think about Bitcoin now,” she added.
Entering the crypto space
Her entry into Bitcoin in 2021 was not a celebratory one. She called it a moment of “growing discomfort” over the little control people had over their money that pushed her into crypto.
“Every payment, every transfer, every ID check—it all flows through third parties,” she said, frustrated. But Bitcoin changed everything.
“When I discovered Bitcoin, it felt like a reset button. A system that removes the middlemen, gives you custody, and treats privacy as a right, not a feature. Once I understood that, there was no going back,” she said.
Becoming a crypto entrepreneur
‘The Sociological Imagination’ by sociologist C. Wright Mills is what happened with Steph. Her frustration in buying Bitcoin privately with heavy KYC procedures and a custodian led her to develop Peach Bitcoin: an online platform to trade crypto peer to peer, easily. But then she realized countless others were affected by the same issue.
“It was just me solving my own problem,” she says when asked about her leap into crypto full-time.
The journey wasn’t without challenges. As a non-technical founder in a technical industry, asking the right questions and relying on technical support to execute her ideas required patience. But on the other side, she identified how Bitcoin had a strong personality of its own, as she learned from her peers who were builders, not talkers.
Much of her learning came from the open-source community and developers who worked on privacy tools.
“The Bitcoin world is full of people who build because they believe in something. That’s contagious,” she added.
Steph wanted to rewrite the misconception that the industry is only about technology, emphasizing instead the people behind it: Their perspectives and how they manage the system without centralized control. She says the hardest part isn’t writing code. It’s designing experiences that make people feel safe using an unfamiliar technology.
Peach Bitcoin and its vision
Peach Bitcoin is a mobile-first Bitcoin exchange platform where people buy and sell Bitcoin privately and directly, without middlemen or KYCs.
Steph spends her time between product development, strategy, and user research to enhance the user experience in its tone, flow, and simplicity.
“I’m obsessed with how Peach feels: the tone, the flow, the simplicity. I want it to feel like a product made by humans, for humans,” she expressed.
When asked what issue in the blockchain space she was most passionate about solving, Steph highlighted custody: the most overlooked gap in fintech.
She referenced the example of FTX, a crypto exchange that collapsed due to customer withdrawals, claiming it wasn’t a blockchain failure but a custody failure where people gave up control and lost everything.
Her mission is to rebuild the system where the norm is self-custody, comfortable, and easy for users.
The next phase in her crypto journey is to extend Peach Bitcoin beyond trading, ingraining it into everyday life, where users trade goods, services, or even pay peer to peer, all in Bitcoin.
“That’s when Bitcoin stops being an investment and starts being an economy,” Steph says.
Reflections of a CEO
For Steph, this journey is about empowerment, to give users the confidence to say, “Yes, I did it myself.”
The myths surrounding crypto were loud in front of her. The assumption that everyone in the space is chasing quick money or wild speculation seemed far from reality. The real work, she says, is slow, difficult, and often invisible.
Builders of blockchain are not driven by greed but by the desire to fix a broken system in the financial world.
The future of crypto is evolving, and according to Steph, regulations will change how people experience financial freedom.
“I think we’ll see less noise and more substance. The future of Bitcoin isn’t about speculation. It’s about restoring ownership, quietly, one user at a time,” she says.
