Beer delivery routes, warehouse work, bad routing tools, and a detour through bodybuilding NFTs — here's how Midnight Loadboard actually came together.
My family has run A&L Coors, a beer distribution business, for years — I was in and out of it for over a decade. I had my own delivery routes early on, went to school part-time, stepped back to part-time, left, and came back more than once. The last several years there, I worked mostly in the warehouse, driving about one day a week. I hold a CDL with all endorsements and I'm a Navy veteran. One of my last assignments in the Navy was truck inspection — unloading civilian flatbeds, blocking and bracing cargo, and helping inspect trucks moving weapons between weapons stations and carriers.
I left a good job at Marriott to try driving again — it didn't work out. My last driving job forced us onto Google Maps for routing, and it was genuinely bad for trucks. That frustration sent me down a technical rabbit hole: the Google Maps API, Google's Fleet Engine, even a drone certification class, all while thinking about what a real "Google Maps for truckers" could look like.
Somewhere in that research I found Cardano — and learning about the existing partnership between Google Cloud and Cardano/Midnight Network is what got me serious about actually building something. I don't have any personal relationship with Google Cloud myself; it was seeing that connection already existed that made this feel like a real path forward, not just an idea. I lost my last driving job a little over a year ago — that's ultimately what pushed me to build full-time instead of just thinking about it.
This isn't my first time building in this space. I've been in crypto for over six years — starting with stock and options trading, then moving into building stablecoins, NFTs, and trading apps well before Midnight Loadboard existed. That hands-on experience is part of why I felt ready to actually build a real payment feature into a freight platform, not just talk about blockchain conceptually.
Before any of this, I was also deep into bodybuilding — I still run @MintYourReps on Twitter/X, built around permanently documenting training progress instead of relying on notebooks or apps that can lose data.
I owned my own gym in Durango, CO for five years, and that's where I put together my Project Catalyst proposal. When I didn't own a gym, I was lifting more myself; once I owned one, my focus shifted to the business and promotion side of it instead. I eventually closed that gym and moved to Aztec, NM to open a new one — and that's where I started noticing freight moving through the area firsthand, right alongside my own gym.
The Document Vault idea actually traces back further than bodybuilding. My first Catalyst proposal, "Long-Term Storage of NFTs for Token Holders," was about turning documents — starting with my own master's thesis and peer-reviewed research papers — into NFTs for permanent, retrievable storage. That's where I first engaged the GameChanger team. It wasn't approved, but the core idea stuck. My second proposal applied the same concept to bodybuilding — minting daily workout journals instead of paying for cloud storage that could vanish. That one wasn't funded either, but between the two, the real thread was already there: permanent, tamper-proof document storage has value far beyond any single use case.
I've been through hard chapters financially too — I filed Chapter 7 during my years at A&L Coors, and Chapter 13 after my own business, Kahili Awards and Sports, closed in Farmington. I'm not sharing that for sympathy. It's part of why permanent, honest record-keeping matters this much to me. When things go wrong, you want a clear record of what actually happened — not a fight over who said what, or who owes who.
This wasn't the first time I almost went. Back in 2014, when I first left A&L Coors, I was set to drive for C.R. England — but didn't go through with it because I was finishing my master's degree. In 2018, my PhD research and my business both fell apart around the same time. Driving back from a residency in Orlando, Florida, I decided again that I'd go drive — but a lawsuit tied to my business got in the way, and I ended up filing Chapter 13, which kept me in the area instead. That thread kept getting deferred for years, until a driving application landed in front of me recently and the whole pattern finally clicked.
I recently talked with a local trucking company owner whose business had to file Chapter 11 after a lawsuit from a broker. I don't know all the details, but it's exactly the kind of dispute permanent documentation is meant to prevent — and it's a big part of why I'm building this.
I'm not currently an active carrier — I don't have equipment or insurance to haul freight myself right now, and I want to be upfront about that. What I am is someone who's spent time on both sides of this industry (warehouse, dispatch-adjacent work, family logistics business) and who ran headfirst into bad routing tools and worse paperwork problems. Midnight Loadboard is what I'm building instead of just complaining about it — permanent documents, verified credentials, and a network I'm building in the open, one real carrier at a time.
The "Midnight" in Midnight Loadboard comes from this period — I was working to build directly on Midnight Network itself, including a Catalyst proposal exploring how a Midnight/OpenZeppelin partnership could improve smart contract development on Cardano. Technical blockers eventually pushed Phase 1 onto Cardano instead, but the name stuck, and that original Midnight vision is what NightHaul and Phase 2 are still built toward.
Two things I'm exploring for what comes after Phase 1, and they're independent of each other. First, a geographic load map layer using Google Maps — showing available loads along a carrier's actual route, corridors like Farmington→Durango→Alamosa in the Four Corners region. This one doesn't depend on anything else and could get built on its own timeline. Second, privacy-preserving freight matching on the Midnight Network. I've already built an interactive prototype called NightHaul — a trucker navigation app with a four-stage selective-disclosure flow: CDL and medical certification identity, hours-of-service compliance, cargo manifest, and fuel loyalty, each proven with zero-knowledge proofs without exposing the underlying private data. Right now it runs on simulated circuits, with a real migration path mapped out to Midnight Network's actual Compact language and SDK — but that migration isn't built yet. Midnight Network's indexer tooling has had real issues that already forced Phase 1 onto Cardano instead, and in talking to actual truckers, the privacy angle hasn't gotten much interest so far. I'm not ruling it out, but it's the less certain of the two right now.
Years in and out of the family beer distribution business — routes, warehouse, and everything in between.
Chapter 7 during the Coors years, Chapter 13 after my own business, Kahili Awards and Sports, closed.
A driving job forced onto bad truck routing tools led to learning the Google Maps API and Fleet Engine.
Bodybuilding journaling and permanent training records, including the second of two unfunded Project Catalyst proposals.
Owned a gym in Durango for five years, then a second in Aztec, NM — where I first saw freight moving firsthand.
Permanent documents, verified credentials, and a carrier network being built honestly, from zero.
A Google Maps route layer (in progress) and NightHaul — a working ZK privacy prototype for Midnight Network (real migration path mapped, not yet built).
The feature this whole story led to — permanent, tamper-proof storage for your BOLs and receipts.
Document Vault →