Hey Everyone!
I’m Phil, Co-Founder of EasyA (the world’s most popular Web3 education app). We’ve been actively involved in growing the Polkadot ecosystem for over the past 2 years, educating over 95,000 developers (from top universities and institutions globally) on Polkadot and bringing hundreds of developers to in-person Polkadot hackathons at Harvard and in London. Over these years, we’ve had the honour of working with almost every Polkadot ecosystem team.
In summary, we’ve seen a huge need for Polkadot to have a coherent universities strategy, embedding Polkadot teaching within top universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge, forging key alliances with their blockchain clubs, and supporting them with launching on Polkadot to drive top talent into the ecosystem. In addition, especially after the decentralization of Parity’s core developer relations and go-to-market teams, Polkadot needs a top team to execute this strategy. EasyA will build and execute this all fully end to end.
Web3 stands on the shoulders of academia and top universities. Vitalik Buterin was just a student when he dropped out to found Ethereum. So too was Robert Habermeier when he co-founded Polkadot.
We recently caught up with Gavin Wood at Stanford University, and will be funnelling the very best developers towards the JAM Implementer’s Prize. The JAM Tour itself is focused on universities, with Gavin Wood appearing at universities around the world in lectures designed to explain the Gray Paper and attract the best talent to build the future of Polkadot.
Even aside from the future of Polkadot with JAM, it is widely recognised by parachains and ecosystem teams that Polkadot today needs more fresh, top-quality talent. This is exactly what we will bring through the EasyA x Polkadot University.
The below is a more in-depth explanation of the EasyA x Polkadot University, our vision for it, and how we will execute it. We welcome participation from the whole Polkadot ecosystem, since we know that this will benefit all projects, founders and parachains alike building on Polkadot.
We can’t wait to bring the next massive wave of founders to Polkadot!
– Phil, Co-Founder of EasyA
One-liner
EasyA builds a dedicated programme focused on teaching university students about Polkadot and supporting them with launching new projects in the Polkadot ecosystem.
About EasyA
With almost 1 million developers from top universities, companies and projects across the US, UK and Europe, EasyA is the world’s most trusted and engaged community of Web3 builders. Founded by Oxbridge/Ivy League grads, EasyA works very closely with over 300 of the world’s best blockchain clubs, frequently ranks as one of the top apps on the App Store, and has been featured as Apple’s App of the Day. Our hackathons and crash courses on the world’s leading Web3 networks such as Solana, Polygon, Polkadot, Ripple, Algorand, Aptos, Tezos, Binance, ImmutableX, Sui, Stacks, Stellar and many more attract the world’s most talented hackers, since EasyA is a powerful signal to them of quality and excellence. Projects coming out of our hackathons have in turn raised from the best: all the way from a16z to Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund to Y Combinator and beyond. The combined valuation of companies launched by EasyA hackathon winners is over $2.5 billion.
With the support of Decentralized Futures, we will build the EasyA x Polkadot University. In summary, Polkadot needs a coherent university strategy and execution. EasyA will build and execute this end to end.
Key voices such as Bill Laboon have expressed this need too. We caught up with Bill Laboon about it at ETH Denver, as well as Rob Habermeier at Decoded, and there is no doubt that this need is both urgent and important. One of the secrets to Solana’s success is its Solana University, which was formally announced in 2022. Solana University is Solana’s programme ‘aimed at equipping university students with tools to connect to the Solana ecosystem, learn Rust, and launch new projects’. Since inception, it has on-boarded thousands of students to Solana, and created some of Solana’s most die-hard supporters and contributors.
Students are the key to blockchain growth. Vitalik Buterin was 19 when he wrote the Ethereum Whitepaper. Polkadot co-founder Rob Habermeier was a student when he dropped out to co-found Polkadot. Solana’s recognition of the power of students has contributed to its exponential growth over the past few years.
Our goal is to find the next Vitalik Buterin or Robert Habermeier and get them building on Polkadot.
EasyA x Polkadot University
The EasyA x Polkadot University will be tightly integrated with Polkadot, Kusama and of course Substrate, teaching university students and developers about all three.
EasyA has been an active contributor to the Polkadot ecosystem since early 2022, when it hosted the first ever in-person Polkadot hackathon for students in London. The full report from that first Polkadot hackathon is available on Gov1, and since then we have continued to draw the best developers to Polkadot.
In 2023, we launched our #60DaysOfPolkadot educational campaign which went viral, attracting 40,000 talented developers to learn about Polkadot.
Our hackathons at Harvard University (USA) and in London (UK) in the summer of 2023 then brought 550 of these incredible developers together. They launched projects which have now raised grant and VC funding, and are continuing to make huge strides in the Polkadot ecosystem. Our full report for the #60DaysOfPolkadot, along with our milestones and KPIs (which were all successfully completed), is available on OpenGov.
We are now continuing to build on this success with our 2024 #180DaysOfPolkadot. This focuses on growing momentum further and hosting what have now become Polkadot’s flagship hackathons at Harvard and in London. The first of the two milestones was recently approved on OpenGov with a huge 88% support.
Decentralized Futures requests/needs which this addresses
Growth
Developer Experience
Events
Development Services
High-Value Partners
Decentralized Marketing
How we will do it
Over the past 4 years, EasyA has developed a tried and tested 3-step formula for ecosystem growth:
- Educate developers via the EasyA app
- Invite hundreds of the best ones to in-person hackathons
- Support these students with launching their blockchain startups
Polkadot needs a core team that will maintain relationships with universities and student clubs and execute on this all. Currently, there is nothing like this in the Polkadot ecosystem. There are amazing people like Shawn Tabrizi who are bringing Polkadot to universities. We will supercharge this, and leverage EasyA’s immense universities network and the EasyA app to grow Polkadot in universities at scale. In other words, we will be Polkadot’s universities team.
So far, we have already started the above three steps using the funding we have received via OpenGov. However, we need to go into more depth with each one. For step 1, we need to educate developers even more deeply via the EasyA app and also in-person workshops. For step 2, we need to host more hackathons to build developers’ confidence. Most importantly, for step 3 we need to give grants to builders so that they have the funding required to launch.
To do this, we’ll educate students directly on Polkadot.
As Bill Laboon noted (on this Polkadot Forum) in support of Polkadot education at universities: ‘There is a lot of room to use Substrate at universities and teach Rust in general‘. Polkadot has a number of great resources, like the EdX course. We just need to package them in such a way that we can get these Polkadot resources straight into universities without reinventing the university curriculum yet. We will initiate this via EasyA’s immense universities network, first via the EasyA app and building grassroots momentum (e.g. with workshops), eventually decentralizing this education for maximum scalability. Once the grassroots students learn about Polkadot, they will then discuss it with each other, and subsequently teach it to each other. Polkadot education will then rise up to professors, who will in turn restart the cycle by teaching Polkadot to their students, ultimately forming part of the university curriculum.
We will administer and manage a grants model too. The overall goal of the grants: anyone who wants to build on Polkadot can get initial funding to do so. They could build anything in the Polkadot ecosystem, be it developer tooling, their own Substrate pallet or a dApp on one of the Polkadot parachains. Numerous EasyA teams, such as DotIAm, have already won grants within the Polkadot ecosystem and we can’t wait to continue showing them the potential of building on Polkadot.
Ultimately, we will also give these student teams exposure to VCs. We have had huge success with this already. Students coming out of EasyA have been funded by a16z, YC, Founders Fund, and many more top VCs. They’re literally building the next unicorns. Chances are, you’ve already even seen them! Let’s take an example from just last month. Did you see Devin on Twitter, the viral AI software engineer? The one that was retweeted by pretty much everyone, like the co-founder of Coinbase and Paradigm, Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of OpenSea Alex Atallah, the Collison brothers (Stripe co-founders), and pretty much everyone else! Yep, their co-founder first started building at an EasyA hackathon when he was studying at Harvard University!
Today, they’re backed by a who’s who list of tech founders, from the co-founders of Stripe (the Collison brothers) to Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and more. Collectively, in just the past 1.5 years alone, startups coming out of EasyA hackathons are valued at over $2.5 billion dollars.
Imagine if we got just one Polkadot startup the same exposure. This would be all Polkadot needs to get an exponential increase in developers and founders building on it.
Hundreds of developers lined up around the block for our Polkadot Hackathons in 2023
In addition to the EasyA app, we have some of the strongest social media accounts in Web3, and are growing rapidly. This is an unmatched distribution channel. Combined, we have over 1 million fans, and billions of views:
- TikTok: 410k followers
- Instagram: 352k followers
- Twitter: 150k followers
- YouTube: 445k subscribers
- LinkedIn: 3k followers
About EasyA’s founding team
EasyA’s co-founders (both Oxbridge and Ivy League graduates) are serial hackathon winners active in crypto since 2013, giving them an in-depth understanding of what makes hackathons succeed and how protocols can attract the best talent. Prior to founding EasyA, Phil Kwok founded two groundbreaking marketplace startups and worked at top New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. He was one of the youngest people ever to pass the New York Bar and consistently ranked top of his year as a scholar at Cambridge University. Our other co-founder, Dom Kwok, worked at The Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs, after graduating Cum Laude from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania as a Joseph Wharton and Benjamin Franklin Scholar.
Phil and Dom are both respected thought leaders in Web3 and developer/universities education. Phil and Dom each have over 100k followers on Twitter.
They have both been featured on the world’s most respected news outlets, from the Wall Street Journal to the BBC to Yahoo Finance and beyond.