Carter Woetzel doesn’t like to do things by halves. By the time he finished college, he’d written a book, published it, founded a company, and raised five million dollars. But the real story? It starts with confusion. Two links to the same meeting. The wrong email. Waiting to be let into his own call. “Classic Web3,” he laughed.
And that’s Carter: smart, self-deprecating, and endlessly energetic. Co-founder of Shade Protocol and now Head of Business Development for Sky / MakerDAO North America, he’s spent the last seven years neck-deep in blockchain, and still talks about it like a college kid falling in love for the first time.
“I was studying computer science and finance,” he says. “My cousin sent me something about Bitcoin. I go down the rabbit hole. Sixty pages of notes later, I’m like… am I writing a book?”
He was. It became Building Confidence in Blockchain, a clear-eyed look at crypto that filled the gap between the overly technical whitepapers and the too-shallow hype books. He published it through New Degree Press, no fancy academic gatekeeping, just hustle and clarity.
The blockchain was transparent – too transparent
During his studies, Carter played around with Ethereum, smart contracts, and stablecoins. But he hit a wall.
“It hit me, this is totally transparent. If you were running a SaaS company and paying employees on-chain, your competitors could see every transaction. Your staff could compare salaries. You could get front-run, liquidated, exploited.”
That’s when he stumbled onto Enigma, a privacy project and the predecessor to Secret Network. He joined early, spun up a validator node, and eventually co-authored the foundational paper for the network, dubbed “the gray paper” to distinguish it from the legacy whitepaper.
“I wanted to build something on top of Secret,” he says. “Not just evangelise. Build.”
Enter Shade: the dream of a private stablecoin
So that’s what he did. Still in college, Carter raised $5 million and co-founded Shade Protocol, a privacy-first decentralized finance (DeFi) platform.
“The dream was simple: do what Terra was doing, but better. More sustainable. Private.”
Shade launched Silk, a stablecoin pegged not just to the US dollar but to a basket of currencies and commodities including the euro, yen, Canadian dollar, gold, and even Bitcoin. It wasn’t just an inflation hedge. It was a defiant response to the endless parade of dollar-only tokens.
But then Terra collapsed. UST vaporized. And suddenly, “do what Terra was doing” didn’t sound so smart.
Pivot. Build. Repeat.
Carter and his team didn’t fold. They rewrote the model, from algorithmic to over-collateralized, inspired by the MakerDAO model.
And they didn’t stop at Silk.
“We ended up building a DEX, a liquid staking token, an encrypted money market. Basically a full DeFi stack.”
Too much? Maybe. Carter says yes.
Lessons from the edge
“We were spending fast. Hiring contractors. Building six products in parallel. It was go, go, go.”
Then the bear market hit. Capital dried up. Carter had to let people go. The dream didn’t die but the team got lean.
“I had to grow up fast,” he says. “Don’t overhire. Don’t split focus. And never outsource your core story to contractors.”
Today, Shade is smaller but stronger and consists of ten people, including Carter and his co-founder Mohammed (surname), who both work second jobs to keep the protocol alive.
Carter heads up business development at MakerDAO, one of the biggest names in decentralized finance. Mohammed works for audit giant Informal Systems. They use those salaries to self-fund Shade, not because they have to, but because they believe in it.
“We’ve refused to give up”
That belief is shared by a tight-knit community. From ex-Terra users to Secret Network die-hards to Atom holders, Shade’s base is weirdly loyal, and fiercely aligned.
“We airdropped the governance token to Secret, Terra, and Atom stakers,” Carter says. “Now, oddly enough, we’ve got more Atom staked on Shade than Secret.”
In total, the protocol has handled:
- Over $500 million in volume
- 1.2 million trades
- Around $10 million in TVL today (down from $25 million during the last market peak)
“It’s still millions of transactions,” he says. “Even now.”
What’s it like to run a startup and work at MakerDAO?
“I don’t sleep much,” he says.
But seriously, it’s a rare combination. Maker gives him deep exposure to real-world DeFi at scale. Shade gives him purpose and ownership. It’s not just a passion project, it’s a proving ground.
“People look at us and say, oh, you’re the founders. But Shade has had six different contributor teams over the years. We’re just the ones who’ve stuck it out.”
The Shape of privacy in DeFi
Carter is quick to acknowledge the liquidity gap. Privacy protocols still struggle to attract the kind of DeFi capital that floods into more open, tradable ecosystems.
“People don’t understand they’re walking into a war zone when they use transparent DeFi. Bots. Front-running. Exploits. Our entire goal was to make a place where you’re not a target.”
That commitment to privacy hasn’t wavered, even if adoption lags.
But the community sees it.
One anonymous user wrote recently:
“It would have been easy to launch a pump-and-dump. Instead you built real revenue, real sustainability. No one else in Cosmos is doing this.”
One percent better every day
Ask Carter what keeps him going and he’ll tell you: it’s the people. It’s the dream. And it’s the simple belief that if you get one percent better every day, you can survive anything.
“I’ve made mistakes. Overspent. Overhired. Tried to do too much at once. But I’ve learned. I’ve grown. And I wouldn’t trade it.”
He’s 26. He’s written a book. Built a protocol. Led a team through downsizing and kept going. Still talks like a college kid. Still building.
Still here.
