He spent sixteen years writing code that printed profit on a trading desk. Then he rewrote what it takes to ship on a blockchain - down to a single line.
The dual title is no typo. He signs off as CEO and CTO - the man who sets the vision also writes the code that ships it.
Ask most engineers to put something on a blockchain and watch the flinch. Solidity. Hardhat. Wallet configuration. Gas. A week, maybe two, before anything moves. Bankole Omodunbi built a company on the bet that the flinch was optional.
That company is Verbwire, and Omodunbi runs it as both chief executive and chief technology officer - a combination that tells you exactly where his loyalties lie. The product is infrastructure: a REST API that abstracts the messiest parts of Web3 into something a developer can drop into existing code. Deploy a smart contract to any EVM chain without touching Solidity. Mint ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens with zero configuration. Move assets across chains in one call. Spin up a non-custodial wallet from an email address. Pin files to IPFS. Read ownership history and collection analytics off-chain as if it were any other database.
The framing he likes is blunt: powerful technology shouldn't require a PhD to use. Verbwire's own line is that a single API call could replace weeks of Solidity, Hardhat, and wallet configuration. The whole pitch lives in that swap - weeks for seconds, specialist for generalist, gatekeeper for door.
What makes the wager credible is who is making it. Omodunbi is not a crypto tourist who discovered blockchains during a bull run. He is a career quant and engineer who spent more than a decade and a half inside the machinery of Wall Street, and who left it deliberately - not because the building was on fire, but because there was a harder, more interesting problem somewhere else.
Before Verbwire there was a trading floor. Omodunbi's career ran through UBS, Citigroup Asset Management (the Legg Mason side), and finally Credit Suisse, where he rose to Managing Director in equities quant trading and headed principal trading products. The work was code - algorithms that priced, hedged, and executed at speed, the unglamorous machinery beneath the screens.
He walked away in 2021. The easy story would blame the chaos that engulfed Credit Suisse in its final years, but Omodunbi has been clear that internal turmoil was not the reason. The pull was an engineering problem. Blockchain offered a fresh class of things to build, and for someone who had spent his career solving for milliseconds and basis points, novelty was the draw.
There is a neat symmetry in the move. The languages Verbwire lets developers use - Python, Java - are the same ones that fill the toolkits of Wall Street technologists. By abstracting away Solidity, Omodunbi effectively opened a side door for an entire population of finance-sector engineers who can code but were never going to learn a niche contract language to dabble in Web3. He built the bridge he himself would have wanted.
His co-founder knows the same hallways. Justin Bojarski spent fifteen years writing code and algorithms at Credit Suisse. Between them they carry more than thirty years of Wall Street experience into a startup whose stated goal is almost charmingly populist: help the next million-plus developers get into Web3.
Sixteen-plus years across UBS, Citigroup Asset Management (Legg Mason) and Credit Suisse in quantitative trading and technology.
Leaves Credit Suisse, where he was a Managing Director in equities quant trading and head of principal trading products.
Co-founds Verbwire with Justin Bojarski to simplify Web3 development for everyday engineers.
Verbwire pitches at the Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day, profiled by TechCrunch.
Verbwire launches, letting anyone create and deploy smart contracts regardless of experience.
Most recent raise reported; total funding reaches $12.3M at Series A.
Push a smart contract to any EVM blockchain without writing or auditing a line of Solidity.
ERC-721 and ERC-1155 minting out of the box, no boilerplate to wire up first.
Send assets across blockchains with a single API call instead of a bespoke bridge.
Generate non-custodial wallets from an email or phone number - no seed-phrase ritual.
Decentralized file and metadata storage handled through the same interface.
Ownership records, transfer histories, and collection analytics queried in real time.