21 years old, 2026.
I taught myself to code at fifteen, and I’ve spent every year since building things people actually use. Somewhere along the way, I ended up being invited by OpenAI to meet Sam Altman, and featured in a documentary.
I’d been tinkering with computers since I got my own at five. When lockdown arrived in 2020, I finally taught myself to code: building things, breaking them and building them again, just to see how they worked.
That curiosity pulled me into open source, and into volunteering on software that communities build and run for themselves.
Vaccines reached India in short supply, and getting a slot meant refreshing a government website all day. So I built Vaccine18: enter your pin code, and it messages you on WhatsApp the moment a slot opens for people over 18.
There was a catch. The government’s API only answered requests from Indian IP addresses and blocked AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, so the whole service ran on my own computers, left on through the night.
Hundreds of people signed up the first night, purely by word of mouth. Then my phone started ringing: strangers calling to say my alert had come through and they’d booked their shot. Those calls changed what I wanted from software. From then on, I wanted the things I built to give something back.
Traditional finance was all red tape for someone my age. Crypto asked for no identity, so my age never came up. A tweet from Tanmay Bhat led me to Superteam, the community he, Akshay BD and a few others were starting for people building on Solana.
My own frustration was the wallet address: a long string you copy, paste and pray you didn’t mangle. So I built Wagmi.bio, a short link like wagmi.bio/kunal that anyone can pay. Superteam backed it with their first global grant (the community now spans more than two dozen countries), and Wagmi.bio went on to pass 3,000 users and make money.
Public crypto addresses are hard to remember and anxiety inducing. Introducing @WagmiBio by @kunalbagaria.
Open source
A command-line tool, written in Rust, that makes any keyboard sound mechanical. It has 260 stars on GitHub and more than 13,000 downloads.
Volunteering
I volunteered to build and maintain the community’s own tools, from dashboards to Discord bots.
Grants
Superteam spotlighted me for winning more Instagrants than anyone in the community: five and counting. Its guide to earning in web3 later held me up as proof that grants aren’t only for people with decades of experience.
Five minutes into reading the code behind Riptide, the voting platform for Solana’s global hackathon, I found a security flaw. I emailed the team, and it was patched within half an hour.
Website bugs weren’t covered by the Solana Foundation’s bounty program, so I expected a thank-you at best. Five weeks later, this arrived.
…while this isn’t a critical bug relevant to the core codebase, we believe this is a valid exploit and will be rewarding you $25,000 USD worth of 1 year locked SOL.
By then I was a software engineer at Wordcel, where I wrote the first commit of its open-source app and hundreds more after it. In November, I spoke at Solana Breakpoint in Lisbon on a panel called “On Being a Young Crypto Founder,” alongside Soju of Solend and Ryan Shea of Nation, moderated by Superteam’s Kash Dhanda.
Hackathon
With friends, I built a way to shop on Amazon with USDC on Solana. It took second place in the payments track of Solana’s Summer Camp hackathon.
Security
Won at BountyCon 2022, a security CTF hosted by Meta.
In June, OpenAI invited me to an intimate developer roundtable with Sam Altman at IIIT Delhi.
This roundtable will be an opportunity to join Sam and a group of 30 developers for an interactive discussion and to provide feedback on OpenAI’s API and products.
Security
Spent two days in Seoul at Meta’s Bug Bounty Researchers Conference.
Security
Shows who else can spend the tokens in your Solana wallet, and revokes those approvals in a single signature. I rebuilt it from scratch in 2026.
In December, Tanmay Bhat, Akshay BD and ex-AIB head writer Devaiah Bopanna released Superteens, a documentary about four teenagers who found success and purpose in crypto during the lockdown. I’m one of the four.
Harkirat Singh had me on his podcast to talk about starting young, finding my way through crypto, that $25,000 bounty, and a $100k offer as a Solana engineer.
Community
I managed the fellowship. Many of its fellows went on to do great work across the ecosystem.
I wondered what Interstellar would look like if Studio Ghibli had made it, so I made it with ChatGPT and Morphic. It was watched more than 6.3 million times on X.
In April 2025 I joined Sanctum, whose liquid staking protocol holds more value than any other protocol on Solana. I spent a year there, until March 2026, working on some of its LST infrastructure, frontends, the Sanctum Mobile app and the Gateway product.
Security
Co-hosted Superteam India’s first CTF: a hacking competition with ₹5 lakh in prizes.
Along the way there have been more grants, hackathon wins and security bounties. This July I helped bring the Capture the Flag back for a second year.
If you’re working on something interesting, I’d love to hear about it.
Away from the keyboard, I sing and play the piano. I post singing videos on Instagram.
Watch on Instagram@bagaria_kunal
Or play a few notes yourself. On a computer, the keys from A to K work too.
