Founder and CTO

Job role

I'm Daniel Maricic. Let me tell you about Kelp.digital — it's the purest expression of who I am as a builder. Kelp.digital is a pioneering content rights and multimedia management platform born from blockchain roots. It uses cryptography to issue legally binding digital certificates for intellectual property — giving photographers and creators the tools to verify, store, and transfer ownership of their work without intermediaries. As Founder and CTO, I architected and built Macula, a content rights management platform, while driving developer ecosystem engagement and cross-functional community building. I led the company through its full lifecycle: hiring and managing a team of 7 across remote locations, defining product vision, securing EU Next Generation Internet grant funding, and shipping a production platform entirely remotely.

Macula is a centralized platform evolved from my earlier blockchain work on Anagolay Network. I designed it as an event-driven platform with REST and GraphQL APIs, dual IPFS/S3 storage, and custom image processing pipeline built on Sharp and ExifTool. The analytics subsystem uses QuestDB for real-time metrics and SurrealDB for knowledge graph queries.

In the Macula tech stack I implemented SSO based on better-auth as a default login mechanism with MFA and OAuth2 support. Macula has Stripe implementation with free and paid plans with correct setup and webhooks for client updates and recurring payments.

I wrote 44,000 lines of production TypeScript personally (no AI involvement at all), covering the full stack: Svelte frontend, serverless backend, Lightroom plugin, SSO, Stripe integration and a custom MCP server — the latter directly extends the Claude AI ecosystem, enabling AI agents to interact with Macula's content rights data. Every line reflects deliberate engineering.

Beyond engineering, I wrote successful grant proposals for the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program — a process that required articulating technical vision to non-technical stakeholders, managing milestone reporting, and building relationships with EU program officers. I managed a distributed team of 7 across remote locations, mentored contributors, and made strategic decisions about product direction, team composition, and resource allocation. The AI plugins and implementation work positioned the platform at the intersection of content rights and AI — an emerging ecosystem I helped define.

This role was 100% remote, where I practiced async communication, self-managed delivery, and cross-timezone collaboration daily.

Personal development

I'm Daniel Maricic. Kelp.digital is where I proved I could carry a product from zero to production as a solo founder and CTO — owning both the technical depth and the leadership weight. I learned to make hard calls about team size, funding, and roadmap trade-offs at a startup where every decision had direct consequences. The experience taught me that I'm at my best when building something from nothing — starting with a blank canvas and creating a platform that didn't exist before. This realization shapes every career decision I make.

It also taught me when to prioritize well-being over growth — a decision that required more courage than any technical challenge. Walking away from growth to protect the team and product was the hardest and most important leadership lesson of my career. Kelp.digital showed me that building the right thing sometimes means knowing when to stop.