2013
Discovered bitcoin. collected satoshis via btc faucets for fun. digital money wasn't that amazing to me back then.
2017
Discovered Ethereum early in the year based off headlines, bought some and started reading about blockchains.
Mid year, I was onboarded into the Sydney crypto community by Sharon Lu and BokkyPoobah's Sydney Ethereum Developer meetups. This was whether I recognized the significance of how web3 was more than just money and instead a world computer that you can do much more on.
2018
In general, this year was mostly be trying to figure out how to be useful to the world of crypto and how to spend my time:
Edited wikipedia pages on important topics (link),
Wrote content for cryptoeconomics.study (link)
Compiled Aragon's monthly magazine (link)
Went to my first crypto conference at EDCON 2018 in Toronto and wrote a summary (link)
Wanted to get into the contributor credits of Mastering Ethereum so I ran the text through grammarly (link)
Added some history on cryptography and additional lore to Mastering Monero (link)
Contributed toward the first qualitative summary and analysis of EIP0, a community survey of Ethereum's values and future of protocol governance (link + link)
Create the first analysis and breakdown of ETH Prize's 84 developer interviews around application layer developer experience (link)
Attended my 2nd crypto event: EthBerlin and wrote a commemorative poem around the experience (link)
Was an active mod and contributor to the Ethereum Magicians community forums (link) + wrote a primer article on what the Ethereum Magicians (link)
Created a working group called EthProduct to talk about product management in crypto (link)
Highlight: Before Bitcoin. Wrote a blog post series early in the year about the history of cryptography and how it relates to the technologies that blockchains are built upon - ever since the emergence of public key cryptography. Managed to direct feedback/edits from Martin Hellman himself. Published here: Part 1 (70s), Part 2 (80s), Part 3 (90s) + Bankless did a full audio re-read through the entire series (link).
Mid year I started a UX working group focused on meta transactions (now known as account abstraction) which became known as the MetaCartel. The start of what I would never expect to be the adventure of a life time.
The tweet thread where it all started (link)
Recap article of the working groups early days (link)
Recap of the group's memes at EthSF (link)
Recap of the group's work at DevCon Prague (link)
By the end of the year I realized that no one really needed UX infrastructure just yet as: 1. there were not many end user applications that were using the blockchain in a net new manner 2. there were no users! Wrote about it here:
Wrote: There are almost definitely more ‘cryptokitty’ moments yet to come
Tried to ideate a dapp studio/incubator
2019
At this point in my journey, personal savings were running low after spending a full time year orientating myself in the world of crypto. I was applying to every job available and no one would hire me. From social media manager, product designer, head of comms, to investment analyst.
I was effectively hardcore unemployed.
So I looked around at what I could work on.
While I had never expected MetaCartel to be a long term community til that point, I realized that people simply liked hanging out with each other. I decided to spend an entire year on this community to see where it can go.
I tried a few things such as getting grants from the Ethereum Foundation to fund UX infrastructure and to get a dapp incubator off the ground (link), none of this worked... until I saw Moloch DAO get off the ground.
Up til that point, I thought DAOs were mostly a matter of intellectual masturbation so it was a space I mostly ignored - however knowing the first hand friction of getting funding from the EF on public goods, I saw the immediate impact it had on core protocol development (for those that don't know about Moloch DAO, it was the first DAO that emerged after the DAO hack that had meaningful impact. It was a pure grants DAO that distributed funding and coordinated capital from members with a ragequit functionality. Summoned by Ameen Soleimani).
I reached out about joining to help guide grants funding for the application later. Long story short, I was rejected from joining the DAO (tldr; too poor, not cool enough). And may have been the first ever person to be rejected from joining a mainnet Ethereum DAO in history.
Anyways at that point I had been using every application released on every blockchain for months at that point and had started to write about them every week via my newsletter: Game of Dapps (link) - realized how dire the situation was I decided to fork Moloch DAO to launch MetaCartel DAO, a grants DAO focused on funding novel usecases, apps and app level innovation.
Wrote: Rising threats to Ethereum's first mover advantage (May 2nd)
Started opening up grants (July)
First wave of grants (August), second wave of grants (September), third wave of grants (November), fourth wave of grants (2020)
MetaCartel 2019 end of year recap (link)
The MetaCartel grants program raised 150k and distributed most of it to a total cohort of over 60+ builders and 25+ projects whom all still work on furthering the space today. Some fun ones include grants funding Zapper the weekend it started as a project, having helped pilot/incubate the beginning of Collabland, nagged the Catalog team into inventing the idea of music NFTs, funded Andre Cronje the creator of yearn pre-YFI, supported Gelato finance in the early days, incubated MetaFactory, supported Sablier, supported the Superfluid team via rDAI pre-formation, supported Zefram Lou's fantastic 12 DAO tool, onboarded Alex Masmej & Cooper Turley into the broader web3 ecosystem <3
A bit of some MetaCartel lore (link)
Over 100+ weekly community DAO member calls were ran throughout this period of 2018-2020
Ideated and published the idea of a legally wrapped investment DAO with Ameen Soleimani and Gabriel Shapiro in late 2019 (link)
Highlight: Wizard of dapps. I met Lasse & Chris from 1kx early in the year while I was finding a venue in Berlin for MetaCartel and they convinced me to run a podcast on applications in crypto. It has since concluded as a series, however I published 50+ episodes interviewing folks such as OpenSea, Axie Infinity, SuperRare, M3, Cent, Peepeth and many more app level projects from back in the day. You can find the episodes here.
Misc. things I did this year as well:
Created the first ever conference ticket NFT for MetaCartel's Berlin demo day (link)
Made some art of SuperRare as an artist
Created the first NFT art crowd fund commissioning in celebration of Devcon Osaka. Raised $800 DAI in funding from the crowd via a Moloch DAO contract with Known Origin and sold the NFTs in celebration of Devcon for a small minor 20% total profit which was distributed back to crowd funding participants (link)
Wrote the community first manifesto (link) and the web3 manifesto (link), both pretty abstract but yet important documents that represented my excitement for DAOs at that time.
2020
Got MetaCartel Ventures up and running with an initial total raise of 350k from 35 members. The first ever live legally wrapped investment DAO.
Created my social token: $MAGIC
Ran the first NFT hackathon: $Untitled (link)
Mid-2020, I joined 1kx and the rest is history!