The first time I check the Wallet Service dashboard in production, CloudWatch shows 11,400 requests per minute. I close the laptop. I open it again. The number hasn't changed. Eleven thousand four hundred gem transactions every sixty seconds, flowing through the service I designed, the one I wrote the first commit for, the one I never imagined would breathe at this rate. It's 8 PM. My apartment is quiet. The dashboard isn't. I need to tell you where I was before this. Because the gap matters. Before I built this, I was working on a mobile app with maybe 200,000 users. A respectable number. The kind of number where a production bug means you get a Slack thread with four messages and someone says "I'll look at it after lunch." The kind of number where your on-call rotation is a polite fiction. Nobody actually gets woken up. Then I got the contract to build the social platform. Not join. Build. The whole ecosystem. Social media, advertising, food delivery, live streaming, gaming, e-commerce. What would eventually become ninety-five repositories. What would eventually reach thirty million monthly active users. But when I wrote the first line of code, 30M was a fantasy. I was thinking about hundreds of users. Then thousands. The architecture decisions I made early on, the ones baked into the foundation, were made by a version of me who had never operated at scale. And now those decisions run a small economy. That's the part nobody warns you about. You don't get to go back and ask the person who made the critical design choices if they really thought it through. Because that person was you, two years ago, with less context than you have now. I'm tracing the virtual currency advertising flow. One I designed. A merchant creates a campaign, let's say 50,000 GEMs to boost a restaurant post. Those GEMs go into escrow in the Wallet Service. Users scroll their feed, see the boosted post, engage with it. Each engagement triggers a flow: the Ad Engine processes the engagement, cal