SpaceX Executive John Rising Launches $4.2M Crypto Startup

A former senior mission manager at SpaceX, John Rising, has co-founded Stackup, a crypto startup that secured $4.2 million in seed funding to create a platform for managing decentralized assets with centralized control.

• Funding round led by venture capital firm 1kx, with participation from Y Combinator and Digital Currency Group.
• The platform uses account abstraction technology to provide “centralized control of decentralized assets,” according to company founder and CEO, former SpaceX executive John Rising.

In an interview with Decrypt, Rising shared how a tragic aerospace mishap during his Virgin Galactic days shaped his perspective: “We had spent so much time making sure the machine works perfectly that we disregarded the most important part of the system: that a human is operating it.” This experience influenced his focus on user-centric safety over technical security.

Stackup was co-founded by CTO Hazim Jumali, an Ethereum Foundation grantee and former Coinbase engineer. The company previously developed similar technology for major cryptocurrency exchanges.

Account abstraction, introduced on Ethereum’s mainnet in 2023, allows users to create programmable wallets with custom rules, enabling features like transaction approval workflows, spending limits, and easy recovery. Rising emphasized this enables “safety” rather than just “security” for businesses.

With the $4.2 million, Stackup will expand its platform, which aims to prevent catastrophic financial losses from DeFi incidents like the $1.4 billion Bybit hack earlier this year. Rising drew parallels to aerospace failures: “Imagine if SpaceX had 20 launch failures? It’s the same amount of loss in dollar terms.”