Our Story:
From Crab Boats to CrabStar
Some things are built in boardrooms. This wasn't one of them.
CrabStar was built from a friendship that goes back almost thirty years, two careers spent doing some of the hardest work either of us has ever done, and a shared belief that if you're going to do something, you do it right… or you don't do it at all.
We've known each other since we were kids. Grew up together, drifted apart the way people do, then always found our way back. That's the kind of friendship where you can go months without talking and pick up exactly where you left off. No explanation needed.
Both of us spent years working with our hands before we ever thought seriously about crypto. Weather it was some type of construction, or building commercial fishing gear, it was the kind of work that teaches you what it means to actually build something. And then, for both of us, out on the ocean.
Commercial crab fishing on the BC coast is not a romanticized life. It is genuinely, relentlessly hard. We fished the Hecate Strait, the stretch of water between Haida Gwaii and the BC mainland, one of the roughest patches of ocean on the Pacific coast. The weather doesn't negotiate. The schedule doesn't either.
We worked long hours on minimal sleep, hauling gear through whatever the ocean decided to throw at us that day. Calm glassy mornings. Waves crashing over the stern. Rotten squid bait flying into your face when a trap broke the surface of the water.
We burned through crew constantly because most people couldn't take it. The running joke on the boat was that we never even had time to scratch our ass because there was always something that needed doing and never enough time to do it.
But there were moments that made it worth it. Traveling up and down the BC coast. Hunting trips on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Getting to see and do things most people never will. And at the end of every season, no matter how beat up you were, there was a feeling of accomplishment that's hard to put into words.
I got sober in November of 2013, and by the following spring I was on the boat. 23 going on 24, looking for something that would demand everything I had. It gave me structure, purpose, and a community of people who held each other accountable, even when we were grinding through the kind of days that make you stand at the stern wondering what exactly you're doing with your life.
My partner joined the crew a couple of years later, when he was working through his own battle with addiction. That's partly why he came aboard. The captain was sober, I was sober, and the boat was the kind of environment where you either show up or you don't. He showed up.
There's a level of trust you build with someone when you've worked alongside them in conditions like that. It's not something you manufacture. You either have it or you don't.
I eventually got injured off the boat. Bad tendinitis in both wrists and thumbs. The kind that a physiotherapist tells you means you can't go back to that kind of physical work. So I redirected. Got a digital marketing diploma. Started a lead generation business for contractors, made plenty of mistakes, shut it down, learned from it. Moved through sales roles, health coaching, telecom. Always building, always learning.
My partner stayed on the water for a while longer, eventually got sober for good, and we stayed in contact through all of it. I helped him work through some things during that time. That's what you do. In the years that followed, he went deep into crypto and learning about DeFi.
The ocean stayed with both of us long after we left it. Not as nostalgia but as something more like responsibility.
When you've spent real time out there, watching the water, understanding what that ecosystem actually is, it becomes difficult to be indifferent to what's happening to it. We're not environmentalists who read about the ocean in articles. We worked in it. We know what it gives and what it demands in return.
That sense of responsibility didn't disappear when we moved on to other things. If anything, it got louder.
The idea for CrabStar started with a phone call. My partner mentioned he was working on a crypto project. I asked questions. The more he explained, the more it caught my attention. Especially the part about directing a portion of every transaction toward ocean conservation.
It was the detail that made everything else make sense. We'd both been around the crypto space enough to see what most of it looked like. Projects launching with nothing behind them. Communities built on short-term speculation. Money moving fast with no real destination. This felt different. It felt like something we could actually stand behind.
I also told him about the cartoon I'd been writing on the boat. Stories based on the crew, the characters we'd met, the absurdity of that world. Dark humor, told in hyperbole the way only people who've actually lived something can tell it. He saw immediately how it could fit. Not as decoration, but as part of how CrabStar tells its story and builds its community.
We started building. We're not going to pretend we have all the answers or that this is going to be easy. We know what it takes to build something real. We've both done it in one form or another, with our hands and on our own time. This project gets the same standard.
We're doing the foundational work properly before anything launches publicly. The tokenomics. The smart contracts. The charity structure. The community infrastructure. Not because we have to, but because we believe in doing things right.
Someone once put it to us simply: be a professional. Bring excellence into everything you do. That's how we're approaching this.
We know the meme coin space has a trust problem. We're not here to argue about that. We're here to be the exception… to show that a community built around a real idea, run by people with real values, can do something that actually matters.
The ocean gave both of us more than we gave it. This is how we start giving something back.
Welcome to CrabStar.