Nomad Hackers on Building new Web3 Startups
0xMaker Weekly Newsletter • Week Saturday May 20 to Friday May 26, 2023
Over the last two years I have been investing heavily in participating in the global Ethereum Hackathon community. I have been to over 30 hackathons in this time, in 8 different countries. I was a finalist in HackMoney 2021, ETHDenver 2022, ETHVietnam 2022, and ETHTokyo 2023, plus I have won significant prizes at nearly every hackathon. Winning awards are not the only rewards of this investment. The most significant benefit I believe has been making friends, really great memories, learning so much from some of the most intelligent people on the planet and a network of developers and professionals in the Ethereum and general tech ecosystem. I had travelled to cities such as Amsterdam, Lisbon, Mexico City, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangalore, Tokyo and more, where I worked with new teams of talented developers and have since formed a global network of close friends and potential business partners, collaborators and clients. When a team that was formed has a good chemistry, we kept in touch and we sought to work with each other again. This has lead to an organic way of forming teams that can work together on things outside of hackathons. This brings us to now, May 2023, and here, a Villa in Bali, Indonesia.
Over the last two months I had lived in Ho Chi Minh City and now in Bali, Indonesia with a group of developers I had met in hackathons. Now our plan is to create hackathon projects that then are launched as start ups. We are taking the model from the founder of numerous small startups, including nomadList, Peter Levels. There are several important factors that make him successful, that we are emulating.
Go out into the world.
This means to not stay in your home country or home city. This means to become a nomad and to discover the variety of perspectives and wide open possibilities that our planet Earth offers us. Most of us know the story of Peter Levels, how he left his native Netherlands to travel and work in South East Asia, he was working in public, engaging on twitter, and started nomadList out of an organic need for tracking and sharing information on travel for nomads. We are doing the same by building things that are natural extensions of solving problems we have encountered in our own work in tech.
There are two projects that I want to introduce here that are our first startups of this type.
Squad Goals
This is a project that gamifies self improvement and builds social community while harnessing the power of blockchain. Here, squads of 2-7 people, form in order to achieve a specific challenge. Challenges can be authored a-new or cloned from a library of ones created by the community. A challenge is a specific goal that follows the ‘SMART’ guideline, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. At the start, each participant is required to stake an amount of ETH. The start and end date times are set. When the challenge end date is reached, each participant submits verifies if each other member has completed it or not. Those that receive majority of yes votes, get their staked ETH back, minus 10% protocol fee. Those that do not, loose their stake, which get’s divided 10% to the challenge author to incentives good challenge creation, 10% to the protocol and the remaining 80% to those that succeeded in the challenge. Those that succeed in the challenge also receive special Reward NFT of the challenge, that is soul bound, and which becomes a reputation building badge of honor.
Read more about it in our public post here.
VayamAi
The world of work is evolving fast. Our thesis is that in 5 years the number of freelancers will increase to 70% of the work force. This plus the efficiencies introduced by Ai tools will augment our way of working and unlock previously unimagined efficiency and productivity. Another transformational trend is workers being integrated in a globally interconnected economy and being location independent. This unlocks advantages in currency exchanges that unlocks access to more talent for at a lower cost. At the same time, workers can gain an advantage by living and working remotely in locations with lower cost of living. Finally, the creativity and learnings that are gained through changing your location and traveling, increase productivity and transforms individuals in to globally conscious people with respect and appreciation for a wide spectrum of view points and perspectives. This I have learned first hand and it is something that our model, Peter Levels, also builds on top of with nomadList and RemoteOk, platforms that leverage his experience in remote first work and being a digital nomad. From my own first hand experience, there are many inefficiencies in the freelancer platforms, like upwork, fiverr and finding clients from word of mouth. This is perfect for leveraging blockchain, where we gain the benefits of enabling crypto payments, stable coin payments, escrow and on chain reputation by reviews, badges and ratings.
There are 4 major pillars of this freelancer platform.
Crypto Native: payments, ratings and reviews are done on chain.
Community First: There are no fees, the protocol is sustained by premium subscription for promoting job listings.
Culture of Mentorship: After a freelancer or client completes 10 jobs with rating of 5/5, they are air dropped a Mentor soul-bound NFT that puts them on the mentors page where they are available to be contacted to answer questions and provide support to newer members.
Culture of Leveraging Ai Tools: We have a philosophy of embracing as a centerpiece the new Ai technology that opens new paradigms of efficiency. We share our best practices and new learnings with these new tools in our articles page, where any freelancer with mentor badge can post an article, and where readers can tip the author.
Here is how it works. We have a Web2 platform for clients and service providers to make posts about jobs and offering services. The applications are done streamlined off chain. When a match is made, a transaction is made on chain that includes information about the job and the parties involved. We use the public goods protocol Smart Invoice to leverage escrow, milestone payments and arbitrating disputes. When the job is completed and payments are made, both the client and the freelancer submit a review and rating on chain. We have the culture of being Ai first, embracing mentorship, and building a community as we all rise with the new efficiencies that our quickly transforming world offers us.
Read more about the VayamAi platform here.
Wrap Up
This is the first newsletter edition, which I will publish every Friday. The long list of varied themes are: Digital Nomad experiences, life philosophy, technology, Web3, web development, Ai developments, indie hacking, hackathons, meditation, living the life that you want to live most deeply in your heart, being an evolving human in an evolving world, art, beauty, goodness, books, education, rationality, self knowledge, productivity, of embracing challenges and overcoming your own blind spots, limitations, and bringing into reality what is in you in potentiality. Pretty much the common thread is my interests at the time. Overtime it may coalesce into a niche to make it more organized and serve some specific purpose in the global community. Subscribe if it resonates with you!