Marvin Bertin is the Co-founder and CEO of Maestro, a Bitcoin-native infrastructure company enabling the next generation of onchain financial applications. Marvin began his career as a machine learning researcher before transitioning into roles at the intersection of advanced technology and institutional capital. Prior to founding Maestro, Marvin led the venture arm of a prominent digital asset firm, where he invested in and advised startups building foundational blockchain infrastructure. He holds a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London and has spent over a decade working across data science, digital assets, and decentralised finance.
What was the initial problem Maestro set out to solve, and how has that evolved?
Maestro was originally founded to address the limitations of building decentralised finance infrastructure, specifically, to enable real-world financial activity on blockchain networks without compromising on security or decentralisation.
Maestro gained early traction in the Cardano ecosystem. What lessons from that are you applying to Bitcoin?
Cardano and Bitcoin both have a UTXO ledger, Nakamoto consensus, and a similar token standard.
We spent years developing high-performance indexers and developer tools tailored to both ecosystems. That experience has positioned us to support Bitcoin with a software stack designed specifically for these architectures.
Can you walk us through Maestro’s core infrastructure stack?
Our infrastructure stack combines fast, reliable Bitcoin RPC, metaprotocol indexing, mempool monitoring, and real-time onchain event notifications. We’ve also built a dedicated mempool indexer for Ordinals and Runes to support modern development workflows across the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Why has Maestro shifted its focus to infrastructure for a Bitcoin-based financial system?
The shift of building toward a Bitcoin-based financial system was prompted by the major surge of innovation in Bitcoin over the past two years. At the same time, layer 2 protocols, Ordinals, Runes, and attention from institutions are all converging.
Why is now a good time to build financial applications on Bitcoin?
The ecosystem has matured significantly. We’re seeing breakthroughs in protocol development and a clear signal from institutional capital: there’s growing demand for programmable, secure, and transparent financial infrastructure on top of Bitcoin.
What kind of institutional demand are you seeing that supports this direction?
We’re seeing growing interest from institutions, corporates, and even governments. They increasingly view Bitcoin as more than just a store of value and want to use it to earn yield, post collateral, and participate in onchain financial activity.
Their focus on compliance and transparency has directly influenced our development priorities.
How is Maestro meeting institutional standards for compliance and reliability?
While retail and institutional users both want access to Bitcoin-based financial products, institutions face additional regulatory constraints.
Maestro offers a suite of tools and infrastructure designed to meet those needs, integrating natively with custodians, asset managers, and treasury systems.
In which areas are clients most actively integrating Maestro — custody, payments, trading, or something else?
We’re seeing adoption across the board, but especially in corporate treasury management, institutional custody, and asset management.
Our platform gives these clients the tools to participate in the emerging Bitcoin capital market through pre-built, reliable infrastructure.
What would you say to institutions still waiting for the infrastructure to mature?
The real risk lies in waiting. Institutions that delay are going to miss the chance to help shape the financial infrastructure of the future.
Maestro is designed to offer a straightforward, plug-and-play enterprise-grade entry point to the Bitcoin economy.
What can we expect from Maestro’s roadmap over the next year?
We’re expanding our institutional platform to serve everyone from corporations and custodians to Bitcoin miners.
Our goal is to help traditional financial players deploy compliant Bitcoin-based products at scale, which includes banking and lending services and treasury and credit market infrastructure.