Bio
João Almeida is the CTO and Co-Founder of Castle, a leading Bitcoin treasury platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). At Castle, João is driving the development of intelligent Bitcoin treasury solutions that combine automation, seamless financial integrations, and secure asset management to help businesses safeguard their digital assets and unlock long-term value. Prior to Co-Founding Castle, João was Co-Founder and CTO of OpenNode, a pioneering Bitcoin payment processing company that redefined the industry by implementing and scaling the Lightning Network. As a leader in this space, João played a key role in generating, analyzing, and applying real-world data to build a global, scalable Bitcoin payment system. His work at OpenNode positioned him as a leading authority on the technical and operational challenges of building Bitcoin-centric infrastructure. With a Master’s Degree in Informatics and Computer Engineering from (ADD University), João has consistently focused on innovation, security, and scalability in Bitcoin. His career reflects a deep commitment to advancing Bitcoin’s role in global finance, leveraging technology to create trust, efficiency, and transparency in digital payments and asset management.
Experiences
Co-founding and leading the development of a automated bitcoin treasury platform.
Leading and developing infrastructure for a lightning network based payment processor.
Lead development of a student's exchange platform.
Development of customized integrations between different software stacks to automate processes that previously were manual.
Development of integrations with their main fundraising platform, Classy, to create customized extensions to be displayed on the website. Using Classy information to trigger special prizes on wooCommerce store. Responsible for money transactions data migration between campaigns.
Development of Artbattle's new website fully integrated on Wordpress with custom plugins, widgets and theme. Created an auction system fully integrated with slack to be used on the events and a data analysis dashboard.
Responsible for making the shipping proccess fully automated for all Ferreci's web stores. Custom integration between Overstock, Shipstation and WooCommerce.
Additional info
Presented Master Thesis at the premier research conference in bioinformatics and biomedicine
Winner Deloitte ChallengeIT @ Porto
Participation in the Finals of the VII Olympic Biotechnology
"Entrepreneurship at School" - Speaker