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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to a special edition of the Chewy Journal podcast, recorded live at the East Global Istanbul Hackathon. In this episode, I bring you exclusive interviews with the brilliant minds who won scholarships from the Takeoff 5.3 program and are building exciting projects here.
Join me now to dive into their inspiring ventures and creations and learn about their fascinating web-grade journey.
I'm Juanpi, I'm from Argentina, I'm working right now on Talent Protocol and I'm studying System Engineering. I'm a Web Free Social DJ and I can say I'm super into how blockchain can be used on human interactions, not only for economic incentives. So yeah, trying to work on that, develop that and I think Web Free Social will be
onboarding the next billion users. My web free journey started on 2014 but calm down it was because my uncle was a software engineer and it was that moment when bitcoin was appearing on newspaper like once a year so my grandma always asked what
the fuck is Bitcoin? and my uncle explained well this digital currency all that kind of stuff and I was super young and I was listening in the background so that was my first contact with Bitcoin of course I didn't buy any Bitcoin if though I wouldn't be here right now
but that was my first contact then after I finished secondary school, started university, I started digging a bit more buying my first cryptos and well I fell in love with this technology and like a little snowball that became a big big snowball here I am here I landed in the other part of the continent on Istanbul
For this hackathon I'm building something called Builder Score. It's a great way to identify actual builders on this ecosystem. Nowadays there are a lot of shit talkers out there, people with a lot of followers on social media, a lot of blog posts, all that kind of stuff that they think they are builders or they seem to appear builders. But when the time comes
their lack of experience, their lack of skills and it's well seen.
So, we are not solving this problem but we are trying to help. We are a big filter, we are fetching on-chain and off-chain data from all users so we can try to develop a score from them and we'll try to help the whole ecosystem. For other young and talented people like you, what's your advice to help them get into Web3 world?
In my experience is trying and getting out from your comfort zone. You need to take risks, like in anything in life. High risk, high reward. Low risk, low reward. So yeah, you should need to get out of your comfort zone.
Go talk with people, explore, search, try. It's super important to try because we learn from practice, not from theory. So yeah, that's my best advice I can give, not only to young people, but for everyone. First of all, thank you. My name is Simon Puebla. I work as a senior business builder, both for Build and Tritemius. Tritemius is a Web3 venture builder.
And also I bought the projects on the side, it's Blurred Futures, Cryptomerch, and some other stuff going on. I got into F3 a while ago, like 2017, with a blockchain for dummies book that my dad gave to me, being like, oi, can you explain this to me? And I did it, and I got hooked, and ever since I've been there, doing a lot of shit in the meantime, trying with different projects.
And this hackathon, what we're doing is basically we realize that journalists are pretty much unprotected. Those that actually want to investigate a case that might compromise their life because they're investigating a mafia case or something related to gender, for example, in countries where this is a conflict, if they want to receive all the benefits of actually posting it and becoming more famous, let's say, they might face a lot of problems with it because
there is malicious actors on the side. So what we're using is we're leveraging CK technology on Aztec, putting it together with playing around with Lens as well in order to build this way of anonymity for journalists and also allowing for new monetization options for them so they can mint actually, they can post their stories in a marketplace and this can be minted by different newspapers. So how do you see this project scale?
in the future? Do you think there is a wide implications for other type of people? Well, absolutely. I mean, everybody is potentially a creator and everybody can potentially target a topic that can be complicated or can be controversial or can damage somebody's identity. So we might feel encouraged to create
from an anonymous point of view. And it's an interesting, maybe shouldn't be the law, but should be the option, right? If you don't want to expose yourself, but you still want to create and get all the rewards and benefits that come with it, you should be able to, and everything can happen within, because your profile can be linked to a credential that redirects everything to your profile. So I know you were being involved with a lot of hack zones, so this one is different from others. What do you enjoy most about this Istanbul hack zone?
I mean this has been insane man, it's just that, if global it's like a different league. You got a lot of stuff to do, there's a lot of options, you can even get massages and stuff, so it's just like an incredible thing.
and also you can see it in the quality of the people and of course how you treat it but also the level of the competitors that we have here in the Hackathon. It's just incredible because you know that the projects that are going to be submitted can be changing the way things are at the moment because real, real projects can come out here and grow to different levels. They actually said that the projects that have been born in ETH Global have raised more than 300, 400 million already.
So my name is Anastasia, I'm originally from Russia and I've been living in Berlin for three years together with my teammate Georgi who is also from Berlin. Our project is called Branch Club and it's a networking app for professionals. It's not just for crypto but for any kinds of professionals.
We are using AI to make random matching for people and what's actually the main difference is that after the meeting you can endorse user skill. For example, you can if user when registered he mentions that he is interested in crypto or maybe in socials. After the meeting with the person you can endorse any skills of each other
And these skills will be stored on chain and it's basically just fun app for networking but while you do this random coffee chat you're also building your reputation on chain which can be transferred anywhere. But if you skip the meeting or if you will be
will be ghosting person you will be penalized and it's also will be stored on chain so it's only for serious people to network. What inspire you to build this product? I'm actually using similar
app for web 2 networking yes and I find it's very cool because I met so many people I see I think that it's cool to bring it on chain because I already had maybe 30 meetings and also with lots of people I've met and I
I also like to talk about crypto and I think it would be cool if my this social history of connections and endorsement of my skill will be transferred, could be transferred anywhere. Can you share what's your experience about this Istanbul hack zone? So far, yeah, it's pretty, I think as usual.
Great food, great people. I've met with so many people, even with whom I met my friend from the university. Because it's a great hub and this friend from the university came from Dubai, so it was a great middle hub for all people around the world.
So I think it's always great and I really like the projects that I'm working on because I'm actually using similar product and I think I can improve with this on-chain stack and really looking forward for the charging and everything.
So my name is Dario, I'm a 27 years old freelance designer from Rome in Italy. I do freelance design right now. I worked for like three years for a startup company in Rome, also as a UX/UI designer. And then in January I started looking around me and I started working more in the web space.
I started collaborating with this community in Rome called urbe.eth
and I started understanding always a bit more about all the technologies and all the ideology that's in it and I really like how the community is built because it's less on the speculation side of the Web3 and more on the technologies and the ideology and I really like that and
I organized with them the first Italian web triathlon, "Hit Rome", and I was one of the designers in it, one of the most influential. And then, in the meantime, I had some tours around Europe. I went to "Hit Dome" in May and then I went to another event in Naples.
and then I won the scholarship as you did and I came here and I'm trying to build two projects one is going really well it's about
kind of a social experience for a forecaster and a lens protocol, yeah. We're trying to build an experience based around Tinder-like experience, so with swiping to build a different recommendation system.
more around the content itself because you see the content as a card. You can swipe to like, skip or to super like or this kind of concept and this will mint an NFT. It's kind of like a bookmark but we're trying to push this further around the concept of a
token gated chat you can have with the other nft holders of this specific content the whole experience is based off the fact that when you first see the content it is not you can't see the author of it no
nor the community it comes from, but you just see the content and so you can unbiased and you can have an unbiased opinion about it and It's kind of cool for my part because it's also a social experiment so to understand how a new approach to the this kind of work and
can work. The other project is about an implementation of text-to-speech and AI. People can upload a sample of their voice and get an AI that can reproduce every kind of text, script with their voice. So other people can come, write a script, choose a voice from any person that has uploaded
and then they have to send it back to the... we can call it "voicer", the one that uploaded the voice and it has to be approved there was a concept about putting kind of censored words so if you are uploading your voice and you don't want people swearing or saying precise stuff you can put censorship
But in the end, you still have to approve. And this will be minted as an NFT. So you can also... The original concept was to have the copyright of it through the NFT. I wonder what's your philosophy behind your design work? Because you know every designer, they have their way of working. What's yours? My mentor right now is kind of my friend. We worked together for three years.
and he taught me really a lot about consistency in the workspace also than in design. And I try to always keep a precise workflow and to keep things organized to never lose the focus about the real point. I try to always keep the things out of my personal opinion
because it matters but in the end the real point is from the user perspective and so in the last period
Mostly when I got into Web3, I started more and more leaning into the UX side. So how do things work? How can we make it better? And how can we improve it? I participated in a conference here in Istanbul about it. And it was super interesting actually talking about
best practices and what works, what does not work, the experience of other designers.
And I really like this kind of approach more than the basic visuals and cool designs and trends. So my main goal right now is to build projects that are solid, even if I can lack a little bit on the visual side. But if the project actually is good, it's still a success on my part.
So my name is Filipe Macedo, I'm from Lisbon in Portugal and I'm building Talent Protocol.
my startup that we started two and a half years ago, more or less. But we also really like to participate in hackathons to build, experiment building other projects. And actually this week we just launched a side project called Builderfy. So probably that's the one that's top of mind for me right now. So Builderfy is built for builders, so people that
like to build businesses, build products, build interesting things. And it's a way for people to kind of monetize their knowledge, their passive knowledge. So there's an incentive for people that have knowledge to share it with people that need it. And there's like a financial layer on top of it that allows for these interactions. But basically what happens is that if you want...
to ask someone a question, you have to buy a key to that person and if you buy a key you can see all the past questions and answers and you can ask a direct question to that person. So for example imagine you can ask a private direct question to Elon Musk what would you ask and how much would you pay for it? And the interesting thing is that buying a key, a key is like a
tradeable assets, so you're not paying for a service. So it means that you can then sell your key back to the market and after using it to ask the question and if that person is actually more
popular or more successful after that you can actually make money also so you're not only getting knowledge but you can also make money of course you can also lose money because the price can come down but still since you also had utility and you got knowledge from it even if you lose some money I think it's probably a cost that you'll probably think it's fair for the knowledge that you got at this hackathon we're building
uh... an app that's a social game to play with friends so basically you can create groups of friends and then play many games on top of it and we have two modes, two types of games we have the
region not like this call it so game that are many for like long-term grows to for us pushes to be better and where a group of people said set the goal they all put the same amount of money in and if you achieve your goal after 30 days if you don't achieve your goal you lose your money and then the people that achieve it get that money back and doing those 30 days also the money generating yield so you get
So it's a positive sum game. But there's also the degen mode of the app where it's just more other types of money games. For example, the game that we're implementing is basically you and your money is put money in and then you only need to
press a button. The thing is that one person will win the entire money and will be the, for example, if it's five of us, the third person to press the button wins. But you don't know when other people will press it. The game lasts seven days and you don't know when your fans are going to press it. Do they press early?
and then you should press early as well before they get to number three or yes or will they leave it to the last day and if you press it too early you're gonna be you're gonna lose also so different kinds of games of
socializing with friends with the money aspect to it to make it more interesting. You know we are here because of the Takeoff project. Can you share more about what is Takeoff and what's the future vision of this program? So Takeoff is a scholarship to bring builders to their hackathons, to their first hackathon because we know the power and the impact that hackathons can have
on people to not only get them more knowledge but mostly to where they can meet like-minded people and meeting those people usually unlocks new products, new startups, people changing careers, people changing countries. So it can be a very impactful week in one person's life. And the scholarship is all about giving that opportunity to people that normally wouldn't have it. And yeah, happy to be in
doing the 10th edition and hopefully there'll be more to come.
