Zeus’ Evan Kaloudis | A Wallet That Grows With You

Evan Kaloudis first heard about Bitcoin and laughed it off. “Stupid nerd money,” he said. “Like RuneScape gold.” He studied computer science, went through a couple bull and bear cycles, and even played around mining Dogecoin and other altcoins. None of it stuck.

Then came the moment of clarity. He restored a wallet from a seed phrase and realized he could carry real wealth across borders in his head, and nobody on earth could take it from him if he did it right.

“I realized you could take this across borders, you could store it in your head,” he says. “If you have the right procedures this is something that no one could take away from you.”

That feeling of pure, unbreakable ownership you can back up in twelve words, was the spark. That’s why Evan started building Zeus.

From Nerd Money to Lightning Obsession

Once Bitcoin clicked as a permissionless store of value you could take anywhere, Evan ran into the same wall many Bitcoiners hit next: payments. On-chain Bitcoin is great for settlement. It’s awful for buying a beer during a fee spike.

As blocks filled up and people bid for space, he thought there’s no way this works at a grocery store. Ten minutes to an hour for confirmation is fine for a wire transfer, but not for the fast food drive through.

So when Lightning went live, he jumped. Evan spun up a dedicated node box at home while working his first job in cybersecurity in New York. He opened channels, bought stickers from the Blockstream store, saw payments clear instantly, and started earning routing fees.

“I could open channels to so many different nodes, and I could even earn these routing fees,” he said. “But just checking in once a day wasn’t enough for me.” He wanted to manage his node on the train, in the office, on the go, but the tools for that did not exist yet.

Zeus Starts as a Remote Control

By day, Evan was building React dashboards for big banks and corporations. That experience planted the seed. “There’s this React Native thing, I could use that to build a mobile app.”

Zeus began as exactly that: a remote control for your Lightning node. No marketing team. No venture deck. Just an excuse for a developer to scratch his own itch and check his channels from his phone.

He started hacking on it around late 2018. By 2019, Zeus had shipped as a free, open source, mobile first Lightning wallet, letting users connect to LND, Core Lightning, and other backends.

Fast forward to today and that side project is a full business. Four full time team members are working on Zeus. A wallet that can still talk to your home node remotely, but can also run an embedded Lightning node directly on your phone.

A Lightning service provider, Olympus by Zeus, now helps users get channels and liquidity without reading BOLTs all weekend.

What started as a nerdy remote control has grown into a serious attempt at a wallet ordinary people can actually use. And yes, it’s banned in mainland China, which in this line of work counts as a compliment.

Lightning UX Is Hard, Zeus Isn’t Pretending Otherwise

Ask Evan what’s hard about Lightning and he doesn’t sugarcoat it.

You’re effectively running a server. Your node has to stay online, sync the graph, and build routes. On a phone, that’s brutal.

A lot of wallets dodge that by hiding the hard parts. Some keep everything on-chain and use swaps in the background. Others lean on sidechains or federated setups. Some even go fully custodial to abstract away the complexity.

Evan doesn’t hate the experimentation. He actually praises the variety: Muun’s swap model, Liquid based designs, Ark, Arcade swaps, Cashu, and more. He thinks we’re still in the “try a bunch of stuff” phase. But he’s blunt about the tradeoff.

“While I love the experimentation, one of the trends that I’ve been seeing is that a lot of these creators of these new wallets are not so honest with their users,” Evan said.

“They blend the lines for marketing purposes whether something is self custodial or not, what’s really happening under the hood, and that’s really unfortunate.”

His bet with Zeus is different: treat people like adults. Explain the tradeoffs. Be clear if something is custodial. Make it easy to move up the self custody ladder when people are ready. That’s where Zeus’ next big idea comes in.

The Graduated Wallet: Tap To Become A Cypherpunk

Zeus started as a power user tool. Evan is the first to admit it. “We’ve really made the premier app for the very technical user, like those cypherpunks who want to be able to connect to their node remotely, have full power, do routing, all this great stuff.”

But that audience is tiny. If Bitcoin is going to matter for billions, your Lightning wallet has to be something you can recommend to your grandma, the waiter you want to tip, the Twitch streamer you support, or your friend who just wants to zap memes on Nostr.

So Zeus is turning into what Evan calls a “graduated wallet.”

The idea is to start simple. New users open Zeus and get a smooth experience. A Lightning address. Fast payments. No channel charts. No liquidity lectures. Use training wheels where needed.

Early on, that might mean a custodial setup, an ecash mint, or something hybrid. The priority is to give people that instant Lightning moment of fast, cheap payments without drowning them in configuration.

And then, detect when stakes rise. As a balance grows, Zeus acts like a sherpa and asks: “Your balance is getting bigger. Do you want to upgrade?”, guiding people up the ladder.

Some users will go all the way: run their own node, manage channels, and route payments. Many won’t. But almost everyone can reach a point where they hold their own keys for meaningful amounts and understand why that matters.

“We can at least get everyone to a place where they understand what self custody is, the importance of it, the risks of not doing it, and guide them to a place where they could hold their own keys,” Evan said.

The wallet is becoming more than just a tool, but an education path for Bitcoiners.

Why Evan Is Betting on Cashu and Privacy First

A lot of Bitcoin projects talk about user experience and quietly sacrifice privacy in the background. Evan thinks that’s a trap. “We’re in an adversarial environment,” he said.

Nation states lean on banks and big platforms to keep their grip on money. Wallet developers and Lightning providers are obvious pressure points.

If your architecture logs Xpubs, balances, and full transaction history on some central server, you’ve built a surveillance honeypot. And if a regulator shows up with a warrant, or worse, a gun, the pressure on the people running that server will be extreme.

So Zeus is pushing hard in the opposite direction. A key piece of that is Cashu ecash, a Chaumian style token system that hides individual balances behind blind signatures.

With Cashu, an adversarial mint could censor or rug users in bulk, but it can’t say this exact stack belongs to that person over there. Evan likes that property a lot.

“You can never target one individual user and say, ‘Hey, you’re out, buddy.’”

Is it perfect? No. You can still run fractional reserve. You can still block withdrawals. But if you care about privacy per user, it’s one of the best options on the table right now, and Zeus is leaning into it as the first stop in that graduated journey.

Importantly, they’re pairing that with a focus on Neutrino and client side validation when users run nodes on their phones, so they don’t have to leak their whole transaction graph to some server just to get a balance update.

Lightning as Language, Not Religion

If you spend enough time around hardcore Bitcoiners, you’ll meet people who treat every alternative approach as heresy. Evan doesn’t have patience for that. He thinks Lightning is becoming the lingua franca for Bitcoin payments.

Under the hood, different wallets will handle channels, swaps, and liquidity in different ways. Some people will ride fully custodial setups and periodically sweep into cold storage.

Others will live fully self custodial at every layer. If your reaction to that is to yell at people for using Bitcoin wrong, you’re going to be miserable.

“There’s going to be some people who are just on a Cashu wallet. They might not even touch self custodial Lightning,” he said.

“They might just build up balances and when it’s big enough they swap out and they go to cold storage on their cold card or something like that. Everyone’s situation’s different.”

For Zeus, the goal is clear: make a Lightning wallet that works for everyone while staying honest about tradeoffs.

Open Source, or It Dies in a VC Graveyard

Evan contrasted open source with his earlier career in proprietary software. He spent years shipping code inside closed systems for specific clients. The company that owned that code is gone now.

The work exists only as some dead repo in a VC portfolio. “Essentially that code is dead now. It couldn’t even be reused or repurposed. It’s just the property of these VCs that made this failed investment.”

Zeus is the opposite. The wallet is free and open source. The LSP protocols they’re building, like Olympus, are meant to be used by other wallets. That comes with pain.

Users can run Zeus with their own node, pay nothing, and never send feedback. Other wallets can copy ideas and code without sending a dime back. Much of the work is thankless.

But if Zeus disappeared tomorrow, the code would still exist. Other teams could fork it, study it, and carry the torch. That matters to Evan.

“If Zeus goes bust or, God forbid, I disappear off the face of the planet, my work can be repurposed, reused, put into a new wallet. People can learn from its lessons and continue things where we left off.”

Yes, Zeus Uses AI, But Actually Reads the Output

You can’t do a modern founder interview without asking about AI. Evan’s take is refreshingly grounded. He was skeptical at first. Now Zeus uses AI heavily, but as a power tool, not a crutch.

Newer developers ramp up faster by leaning on AI for explanations and scaffolding. The team can iterate on features and refactors much quicker. AI helps with code review and even release artwork for new versions. The catch: review has to be more serious, not less.

“You don’t want to just have AI spit something out and be like, ‘Okay, sure, this is in the project,’ and not understand how it works,” Evan said. “It’s an art in itself to be able to prompt AI and know what’s garbage and what approaches work.”

He’s been committing at least one change to the Zeus repo every day for more than a year. AI didn’t replace him. It let him move faster. “It should be your assistant. It shouldn’t be replacing your job.” That’s the same philosophy Zeus takes with users and their money: use tools, keep agency.

Satoshi, Anonymity, and Knowing When to Step Back

When asked what he would ask Satoshi if given the chance, he’d want to know what Satoshi thinks of Bitcoin now. Did it match his expectations? Were some tradeoffs mistakes? But he’s wary of hero worship.

“If he were to come back today, we wouldn’t want to treat him like a God,” Evan said. “Any new ideas he came to us with in 2025, I think he’d want us to scrutinize them as if they were proposed by any other anon.”

That respect for anonymity and decentralization lines up neatly with Zeus’s design: many nodes, many LSPs, many wallets, and no single entity that can be pressured into steering the ship.

Bitcoin doesn’t need a king. It needs many stubborn, freedom obsessed people pushing in similar directions.

Why Zeus Matters

In a sea of shiny fintech wrappers around Bitcoin, Zeus is taking a harder path. Self custody first, but with on ramps for normal humans, and Lightning that can actually live on your device, not just on someone else’s server.

We need a clear label on every trust assumption instead of marketing fog, like privacy as a design constraint, not an afterthought or open protocols that invite competition instead of locking users in.

Evan Kaloudis is blunt about Bitcoin’s future. If we leave Bitcoin locked in ETFs and brokerage accounts, heavily surveilled and routed through a handful of custodians, we lose the point.

Zeus is his answer to that problem: a wallet that can start as simple as a tip jar on your phone, then lead you step by step into full control without lying along the way.

The tech is catching up. The hardware is catching up. The question now is whether enough users care about freedom to climb that ladder.

If they do, there will already be a Lightning wallet waiting for them, built by a guy who learned that twelve words can mean freedom, and spent the next decade making that freedom harder to stop.

Interested in getting started with your own Zeus Wallet? Check out: https://zeusln.com/