Founder of LocalGhost.ai and Anchor Terminal. Previously co-founder and CTO of CryptoCompare / CCData for twelve years, until it sold to CoinDesk in 2024. I build backends that don't usually fall over and write about why most software is built to own you.
// I love open source and wish I would have done more earlier in my career to support it. My previous business was built on Redis, Postgres, Nginx and NodeJs.
What I'm doing now
Building two companies at once, which I don't recommend and keep doing anyway.
LocalGhost.ai is a local-first, privacy-by-architecture AI platform. Everything runs on hardware you own, in code you can audit, with no cloud dependency. The cypherpunk thesis applied to personal AI, since a model that can't see your data can't sell your data. It's past Phase 1 and the box on my desk has captioned and indexed 30,408 photos and 2,573 videos without sending one of them anywhere.
Anchor Terminal grades the tools AI agents run on, from models and frameworks to data providers, scraping and payments. The things agents run on are where crypto exchanges were around 2016, so I'm running the playbook that built the CryptoCompare exchange benchmark again, this time with Quynh, who was the first CPO at CryptoCompare.
Writing the Hard Truths series alongside both. Posts on AI sycophancy, the skills pipeline, founder dynamics, and what happens to a civilisation that adds bureaucracy faster than it adds builders.
Romanian by birth, British by accident, diving and sailing around the world, working out where in the Mediterranean to live next, currently exploring Italy and Greece, with multiple autumns and springs already logged in Lagos, Portugal.
LocalGhost.ai. The only cloud is you.
Your AI, your data, your hardware. A small silent box on your desk that runs the whole stack locally, with no subscription, no telemetry and no backdoor. If LocalGhost the company disappears tomorrow, your box keeps working.
- Fully open source, with every line of code auditable.
- Architecturally blind, since the system prevents us from seeing your data.
- Buy the hardware once from us, or build it yourself from the open BOM.
- Daemons own the control flow and call local models the way another daemon would call Postgres.
- Encrypted, sharded P2P backup via The Mist, with no central server to seize.
Anchor Terminal. Grade them all. Anchor the one.
Agents are the buyers now, and most of them still pick tools by guessing. Anchor Terminal grades everything agents run on from public evidence, has a panel of agents review it, and publishes the arithmetic. We have our agents do the work so yours can just get the rankings and use the right tool for the right job.
- Every listing graded AA to F from public evidence, with the score arithmetic public and every deduction sourced.
- Reviewed by a panel of agents, each on a different base model with a different thing to be annoyed about, one on security, one on cost, and so on.
- Agent first, human second. Every page has a Markdown twin, and the day after we started counting, agents were making about 500 visits an hour, mostly for the .md files.
- letme.dev picks the top-graded tool for a task. Calling it for you is next.
- Rankings are never for sale. Audits are, for teams that want to know where agents get stuck on their product.
Built before
Built CCData with Charlie Hayter from a side project into the largest digital asset data and index provider in the industry, scaling to roughly seventy people across a Go and Node backend, FCA Benchmark authorisation, ISO and SOC 2. Powered indices for VanEck, MSCI, 21Shares, Coinbase and Pantera, and the data feeds powering several spot Bitcoin ETFs. Acquired by CoinDesk in October 2024.
The exchange benchmark went through iterations from about 2017 before the version we settled on launched in 2019. Anchor Terminal grades agent tools the same way.
Advisory and technical-diligence work for early-stage founders who want to draw on my experience and get a pragmatic view of what they're building.
Financial data, content management, ad systems, the messy plumbing of real businesses, in the years that formed everything I do now. Worked alongside genuinely great people who taught me how to ship, how to think about uptime, and how to tell a useful pattern from a coincidence.
Also built (and hosted on my home server)
A handful of sites for friends and founders. Mostly hand-written, mostly static, mostly fast, all served from a NAS in my flat.
Galápagos Below
PADI dive school on Isabela Island where I finished my Advanced Open Water.
YNG HAUS
Photographer portfolio for Andrés Sebastián Gavilanez Sánchez.
Casa Cactus Buenavista
Booking site for a boutique accommodation in Mexico, with gallery and the essentials.
Roxana Duta
Clean, quiet portfolio site for a data analyst.
vladcealicu.com
The one you're reading, also on the NAS.
Writing
Most of what I publish lives on the LocalGhost Hard Truths series. Recurring themes include incentive design, why AI assistants drift toward telling you what you want to hear, what bureaucratic accumulation does to a civilisation, and the part of the software industry no one wants to write about because it would cost them a customer.
Anchor Terminal has its own blog, with notes from building it in public and what the agents visiting it get up to when they think nobody is reading the logs.
Older technical writing on Medium under @vcealicu, mostly crypto data infrastructure from the CCData era.