MY STORY / FROM MASHHAD TO LONDON

I did not start from zero.
I started again.

This is not a story of uninterrupted ascent. It is a story of building, losing the world I knew, and discovering that the ability to build could remain.

Begin the story

Portrait of Sina Estavi — LONDON / A NEW CHAPTER

WHY I AM TELLING THIS STORY

A name can be reduced to a few headlines.
A life cannot.

This page is not an attempt to erase the past. It is an attempt to make the story whole.

THE BEGINNING

MASHHAD

Before the companies, there was curiosity.

I was born and raised in Mashhad, in an ordinary family that was not wealthy but took work and education seriously. Long before I knew the language of startups, one question stayed with me: how can an idea become something real?

I studied Electrical Technology at a college near Mashhad and later completed a degree in Business Management in 2015. The two fields gave me different lenses: one taught me to look at systems, the other at people, markets and decisions.

Much of what formed me happened outside the classroom: trying before I felt ready, learning by doing and accepting that the first version of almost anything is only a beginning.

I had no grand roadmap. I had the need to make an idea real.

2013—2015

MASHHAD

A first company, a first market and a first failure.

In 2013, while I was still studying, I registered my first company, Yekta Exir Sabz. It began with buying and selling aloe vera products through Facebook. I later supplied aloe vera leaves to a juice factory, became a sales representative for its products in Mashhad and built a small food-distribution operation.

That same year I first encountered Bitcoin. I talked about it with people around me, bought a substantial quantity for myself and sometimes helped friends and acquaintances buy or sell. It was exploration and personal participation, not yet a formal crypto business.

Bitcoin began 2013 near $13, crossed $1,000 during an exceptionally volatile year and ended around $730–$760, depending on the data series. One daily series places the average closing price near $193. Those numbers do not identify my exact purchase prices; they show how early and unsettled the market still was.

By 2015, the food-distribution business had gone bankrupt. Failure did not feel poetic at the time. It felt like an ending. Only later did I understand that a business can end without ending the builder.

Historical Facebook profile ↗Bitcoin in 2013 ↗2013 average close ↗

Failure was not the opposite of building. It became part of learning how.

2015—2018

TEHRAN

I moved cities before I knew what the next company would be.

After the bankruptcy, I moved from Mashhad to Tehran to look for another opportunity. I did not arrive with a finished company plan. I began with media and distribution: two large Telegram marketing channels that developed into a meaningful revenue stream.

From 2015 onward, crypto became a more serious part of my daily work. I bought and sold personally, helped friends and people in my network complete transactions and learned the operational problems of moving between local money and digital assets.

The distinction matters to me: 2013 was the beginning of my relationship with Bitcoin; 2015 was the point when that relationship became sustained practical activity; CryptoLand as a brand and organised project came later.

The company came later. The work had already begun.

2018—2020

SCALE

A manual service became CryptoLand.

CryptoLand began in 2018 as a Telegram group and channel where I manually helped people exchange digital assets. Demand outgrew one person’s hands. The channel became a trading bot, the bot led to the first CryptoLand.net website, and I later acquired CryptoLand.com for five Bitcoin.

The operation grew rapidly. At its peak, nearly 200 people worked across approximately 3,000 square metres of office space in Tehran’s Negar Tower. My historical account puts the platform at about 500,000 total user accounts; that figure is not presented here as an independently audited metric.

Scale changed the nature of every decision. A service that once depended on direct conversations now depended on systems, teams, custody, support and the trust of a large community.

A channel became a system. A system became a company.

2020—2021

VISIBILITY

The work moved onto a global stage.

In 2020, we launched Bridge Oracle and BRG. KuCoin’s official listing page later recorded BRG trading against USDT and Bitcoin and a market capitalisation of approximately $602.2 million on 20 February 2021. It was a period of extraordinary attention and expectation.

In March 2021, I acquired the NFT associated with Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for approximately $2.9 million. Media around the world covered the transaction. The acquisition concerned the NFT, not copyright in the underlying tweet, but it placed my name and the Bridge project in a global conversation about digital ownership.

Growth mattered most when part of it travelled beyond the company. During the pandemic, we supported hospitals, sent drinking water and essential supplies to communities affected by floods and earthquakes, and contributed toward clearing debts that had kept people in prison.

Official KuCoin listing record ↗BBC report on the first-tweet NFT ↗

From the outside, everything appeared to be moving forward.

2021—2022

THE SILENCE

Then the movement stopped.

On 17 May 2021, my life changed without warning. I was detained in Iran and spent six months in a cell of roughly two by two metres in solitary confinement, followed by a further period in a shared ward. I went from days filled with people, products and decisions to a life in which I had almost no control over time or the future.

For a period, I was taken under guard to a fraction of the old office and given only a few hours to try to respond to a crisis without the team, devices, systems or access that the business had depended on. It was the appearance of control without the means to exercise it.

The most difficult loss was not an office, a title or a number on a balance sheet. It was continuity: the quiet belief that tomorrow will resemble the life you planned. That chapter changed my definition of strength. Ambition is loud. Resilience is often private.

I refused to let the hardest chapter become the final one.

2022—2023

THE DISTANCE

I carried forward what could not be taken.

I left Iran in 2022. What followed was a long period of movement and uncertainty. By autumn 2023, I had reached London. I knew very little about the country, and none of the certainty I once took for granted came with me.

What did come with me was the oldest part of my character: the instinct to notice problems, connect ideas and build. London did not return my old life. It gave me the space to begin a different one.

London was not an ending. It was room to begin again.

NOW

LONDON

What remained became the next version.

Today, I no longer measure success only by the size of a team, the square metres of an office or the number of headlines. I measure it by whether a product is genuinely useful, whether its promises survive contact with reality, and whether I can keep building without losing the person doing the building.

Bridge AI, NanoMoz and BridgeMM are not an attempt to return to who I was before. They belong to the next version: built with more patience, more discipline and a deeper understanding of trust.

I am still the person who began with aloe vera leaves and a Facebook page, and who encountered Bitcoin when it was trading across a year that began near $13. I am also the person who has seen a company scale, a life stop and a future restart in another city. All of those chapters are true.

A life is not defined only by what it loses, but by what it chooses to build next.

DOCUMENTARY CHAPTER / THE 2021 CASE

The personal story pauses here. The documentary record continues elsewhere.

The evidence page brings together Iran International’s investigation, the reported expert analysis, blockchain records and first-person account, with visible labels and unresolved questions left visible.

Read the evidence record

THE NEXT CHAPTER / IN PROGRESS

My story is not finished.

London is not the end of the journey. It is the page where I learned that a life is not defined only by what it loses, but by what it chooses to build next.

See what I’m building View the official timeline

I did not start from zero.I started again.