Alexander Burge

Founder @Paxmata - Transparent construction payments on @Starknet

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

@MarioNawfal Four minutes of checking kills this one.

Not a "new" program, sponsor licences date to 2008, held by 126,000+ orgs incl. the NHS.
Family claim backwards: since July 2025 sub-degree sponsored workers CAN'T bring new dependants. Real source (GB News) Don't get blinded by fake news

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

Spent 9 days building a solution to the $200bn international development industry. Simplify overseas builds.

AI plans. AI verifies. Contract pays. Nobody holds the keys.
Construct, autonomous escrow for construction payments.

https://t.co/opaYyvOBMJ

#ETHGlobal #Construction

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

@DetectDeepfakes I've been trying to reach your sales team for business sub for a while now... Please reach out...

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

Blockchain-Based Innovation in UK Construction:
A User Perspective - https://t.co/SegNgbbWCk

Insights into Blockchain Implementation in Construction: Models for2
Supply Chain Management - https://t.co/pjRj6GGYpi

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

Two research papers. Both published in the last few years. Both asking the same question: what happens when you put construction payments, procurement, and project funding on blockchain?

One studied eight UK construction companies already exploring this. The other built working prototypes on Ethereum. Automated escrow payments through supply chains, transparent tendering, and milestone-based crowdfunding for construction projects.

The findings?

The technology works. Payments that take banks 3-5 days were processed in under 4 minutes. Donation-based project funding was rated immediately viable. Industry practitioners called it high value.

But adoption is stuck. Not because the tech isn't ready, because the industry doesn't understand what it actually does. People hear "blockchain" and think Bitcoin. They hear "smart contracts" and think cryptocurrency. The researchers found that the biggest barriers aren't technical. They're cultural.

This technology isn't far off. Some of us are already building it.

Grateful for the work by @elnpap, @AlganTezel, Prof. Sulafa Badi, Pedro Febrero and the teams behind this research. Worth a read for anyone in construction, infrastructure, or civic funding.

#ConTech #Web3 #Innovation #FoundersJourney

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

This founders story is full of bugs.

But i taught myself to fix them.

Not from a bootcamp. Not from university. From Mastering Ethereum, Hands-On Mastering Smart Contract Development, YouTube tutorials, web threads, and yeah, AI. I've even a book on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency International Legal and Regulatory Challenges, try reading that when you get a little sleepy.

But I didn't just prompt my way into a working platform. Anyone who's built anything over the few years knows that AI gets you 50% of the way and the other 50%, thats you staring at error logs at midnight trying to figure out why your authentication state won't sync across contexts, or why your smart contract is storing child milestones under the wrong parent. Those eureka moments that make you leap off the sofa.

I've got pages of documented errors from the build. Gas estimation failures. MongoDB authentication breaking because of a trailing slash. A JavaScript falsy value treating milestone ID 0 as "nothing." Every one of those was hours of my life. Every one taught me something, and i LOVED it.

Then something shifted.

I went from building to showcasing. From showcasing to gaining recognition. From recognition to silence, the long stretch where nobody's watching and you're still going.

Now I'm preparing to launch. I delegate the building. But I still problem-solve every day. The strange thing is, the skills transferred. Debugging a smart contract and debugging a partnership conversation aren't that different. You isolate the problem, test assumptions, and iterate.

I don't know if I can call myself a CEO yet. But I know the move from builder to founder is the hardest thing I've done, not because the work changed, but because my identity had to.

#BuildInPublic #SelfTaughtDeveloper #Starknet

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

https://t.co/G1n2CZaQFP

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

Syria signed $14 billion in reconstruction deals in a single ceremony. The President attended. Media covered it. The government called it the start of a new era.

Then citizens started investigating the companies behind the contracts.

One firm, presented as Italian, turned out to be a shell entity registered in 2022 with a capital of €16,000 and one employee.

Another signed a $4 billion deal to redevelop Damascus International Airport. No commercial records. No prior projects. Its listed address was wrong. Its phone number belonged to a different business.

No open tenders were held. No financial or legal backgrounds were verified. Ordinary Syrians, not institutions, became the watchdogs, uncovering what official oversight failed to catch.

90% of Syrians live below the poverty line. Tens of billions are being funnelled into opaque contracts. And the only visible progress is the staging of official ceremonies.

This is a $400 billion reconstruction effort with no transparency infrastructure. No verification. No audit trail connecting funds to actual work.

#BuildInPublic #PropTech #ConstructionCorruption

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

This is why we're building on Starknet.
You can manage a construction project on a spreadsheet. But you can't make milestone verification tamper-proof. You can't create an audit trail that nobody, not even the platform, can alter.
Decentralisation isn't the feature. It's the reason the audit actually means something.

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

RWA market cap up 4X but almost all of it is financial instruments, bonds, T-bills, gold.
Where's the construction and development layer? $300bn+ a year in international development alone, billions in public fundraising, none of it tracked on-chain.
Tokenising the asset is step one. Tokenising how it gets built is the next.

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

@andyyy Add to the list: real businesses using on-chain escrow for construction and development projects.
Not DeFi yield. Actual milestone-based payments where funds only release when work is verified.
The boring, real-world stuff is where crypto actually earns trust.

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

@Cointelegraph How about those tokenised development deals... 👀
Wait, there aren't any.
We have the tech to tokenise properties but nobody's using it to track how they're actually built?
@paxmata 😏

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

@CalebSol @paxmata Construction transparency

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

@Starknet @Cointelegraph StarkNet sure. But accessibility is key. Do you have any idea how expensive it is for startups to implement ramps for payments. Or how convoluted skirting round ramps are. You can privacy all day. But if people can't understand the tech. Nothing moves forward.

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

The rough weather has caused some considerable damage accross the UK over te recent weeks, so i've been looking over some stories in the industry.

I came across this one, a pier. An iconic piece of a coastal town.
The owners launch a crowdfunder asking the public for £250,000 towards repairs. They say they've already invested hundreds of thousands of their own money over the years.

People want to help and the donations start coming in.
But so do the questions.

"Where's the money going?", "How do we know it's being spent on structural repairs?", "What happens if the target isn't reached, do donors get their money back?"

One comment sticks out, someone asking what happens to the funds when the owners realise it won't even scratch the surface. Will they return the money, or just keep it?

So the fundraiser stalled. Not because people didn't care, but because there was no system in place to show them where their money was going.

#BuildInPublic #PropTech #ConstructionCorruption

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

https://t.co/S9WFC2NoU8

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

September 2025 in Bulacan, Philippines, a district engineer admitted under oath that he certified flood control projects as complete without ever inspecting them.

His signature released millions in public funds to contractors. One project, a ₱55.7 million (£700,149) river wall, was paid out in full. When the President visited the site, it didn't exist. A "ghost project".

Another, worth ₱94.6 million (£1,182,500), was built but with so little cement the President could see it was substandard on sight.

The district engineer later admitted that his certifications were based on the assumption that documents submitted to him were complete and correct.

Paperwork. That's all that stood between public money and fraud. Paperwork that nobody checked.

This isn't a one-off. Construction is consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt sectors globally. And the systems we use to track funds, signatures, certificates, trust, are the same ones that fail every time

#BuildInPublic #Starknet #PropTech #ConstructionCorruption

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

Fair question.
I guess the core problem is trust right?
Construction payments disappear, materials get swapped for cheaper alternatives, and when something goes wrong the accountability gets buried under bureaucracy and timelines so long nobody can trace who made what decision.
StarkNet, to be honest, were the first to back me with a grant when nobody else would. But beyond that, their tech fits the use case. Account abstraction means end users don't need to understand crypto. Innovations in privacy, ZK mean we can verify works without exposing sensitive project data. Low fees mean we can track multipule milestones without it eating costs.
For real-world construction with real users who've never touched a wallet, that matters.
Web3 gives us those immutable records. Nobody can edit it, nobody can hide it. When billions are lost to corruption in construction every year, 'just trust us' isn't good enough.

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

As we approach the launch of @paxmata, I want to start sharing more about how I got here.

Not the polished version. The real one.

Two years ago I had some experience with Solidity but zero frontend or backend knowledge. No connections in tech. No funding. Just a problem I couldn't stop thinking about and a fire that wouldn't go out.

I taught myself software development from books, threads, and a mountain of error logs at 2am. I entered my first hackathon, froze under pressure, and didn't submit a single line of code.

I've pitched to rooms that didn't care. Leaned on promises that never materialised. Spent weeks in conversations with organisations who assured me everything was great, only to disappear at the last moment.

One lesson came back every time: don't trust it until it's in front of you.

But I kept building. Because the problem doesn't go away just because it's hard to solve.

More of these posts coming. The mistakes, the lessons, the parts nobody talks about.

#BuildInPublic #Starknet #PropTech

[Alexander Burge @amjburge]

@paceking1 @EliBenSasson @pcshipp Lived in a flat for a year with leaking windows and a landlord who ghosted every repair request. No accountability, no transparency.
So I'm building Paxmata. Milestone-based escrow for construction on @Starknet . Payments only release when work is verified.
Launching Q1 2026.