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A self-made millionaire by 16, Jonathan Manzi is no ordinary entrepreneur. Now 31, the past 15 years have seen him start an energy drink business but shutter it once he realized that there wasnt enough of the required kava-plant ingredient in the world to feed his ambitions of competing against Gatorade.

Becoming the youngest bar owner in San Francisco at 22, Manzi went on to create a robotic FedEx-like printing office with his company INK and later launch Beyond Protocol, a blockchain that styles itself as the internet for the Internet of Things (IoT).

Whether its a biometric suit that records the vital signs of Cage The Elephants lead singer or an electric vehicle charging system spreading across Slovenia, Manzi the magnificent continues to create opportunities for machines and devices to talk and interact via blockchain as they emerge from the old internet.

Teenage millionaire

Manzi grew up in a small town in Massachusetts near Salem, where the witch trials happened many years ago. His first foray into business came about while in high school in 2007 when he started an internet marketing company called Vintage Network based on ad serving technology. He says the challenge and joy of problem-solving got me working 20 hour days to continue to build it. Solving problems was not the only reward, as Manzi found himself a millionaire at a mere 16 years of age.

Of such wealth at a young age, Manzi explains that he largely compartmentalized his success, buying only a used BMW in order to go snowboarding in New Hampshire.

There was a kind of a sense of Im doing something different versus others, but I hope you know I still feel very connected to the others, he explains of his experience of trying to live a normal teenage life as an internet millionaire. Eventually, he found his people entrepreneurs and hacker-types.

We had a $5 million in revenue by the time I finished high school

As he finished secondary education with a multi-million dollar business, Manzi felt that he had pigeonholed himself in this kind of niche internet marketing world. Wanting to move beyond its limits, he applied to Stanford believing that it was where all the innovation was happening. Predictably enough, he was accepted.

As Manzi started his management science and engineering and philosophy degree in 2009 in the depths of the Great Recession, he sold his stake in Vintage Network as it faced turbulence due to businesses cutting their marketing spend. He soon also decided to drop out of university because though he enjoyed the academic environment, he felt he could probably read those books and do it on a different schedule while continuing on his entrepreneurial journey.

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The journey continues

One of the projects he dreamed up was an energy drink created with kava, a fruit indigenous to the South Pacific, which he says lowers the stress hormones in athletes, a claim supported by research Manzi participated in at Stanfords Human Performance Lab.

However, Manzi discovered a roadblock after one of his schoolmates traveled to Tonga on a kava buying mission only to find out that the supply chain was limited in such a way that if we were to have the success of Gatorade, it would be impossible nearly impossible to consistently supply enough kava to keep stores stocked. To further complicate matters, the plant and its sale are heavily regulated in many countries.

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Next, Manzi looked to get involved with a printing kiosk business in Slovenia which aimed to replace print shops. He worked with the companys founder Denis Benic to bring the firm to Silicon Valley with Manzi taking a CEO role. Still, after spending three months in the capital Ljubljana trying to get the expansion deal through, the board rejected his plan.

Despite this, hed convinced Benic, who soon left Slovenia, to live in Manzis apartment while building a new business called Ink, an automated FedEx office, together. In the meantime, I bought a bar in San Francisco and I was the youngest bar owner at 22, Manzi recalls of the few months before Benic arrived.

Manzi knew about and philosophically celebrated Bitcoin since 2012, having previously followed the libertarian eGold project while he was in high school. Despite this, he did not see it as an attractive investment and instead backed into blockchain technology through the cybersecurity needs of HP printers related to his printing business, in which he worked to make enterprise printers less hackable through a system of validating nodes and hardware signatures. Soon, he began to believe that blockchain was the answer to the number one issue in Internet of Things (IoT) and will be over the next decade, that is, the question of how exactly interconnected devices will be able to best talk to each other in a reliable way.

Getting into blockchain was an exercise in finding a solution for HPs cybersecurity problems and getting immersed in things like provenance and supply chain management.

The problem, according to Manzi, is that TCP/IP protocol the internet did a fantastic job connecting nodes and servers but it never anticipated a moment like this, he says, explaining that everything from satellites in the sky to smart pills that track vitals inside someones body needs to be able to identify themselves. You have the information superhighway, but you dont identify the cars on it, Manzi says of the current internet but with blockchain integration, each unit can become connected.

Beyond Protocol

In 2018, Manzi co-founded Beyond Protocol to serve as a way for devices to better connect and communicate. He explains the Beyond Protocol thesis as a blockchain providing a structure and a platform for IoT to achieve its full potential, emphasizing that it is very natural for these two technologies to function together with blockchain effectively providing the environment in which the things of the internet can function.

Devices now, for the first time, can kind of open up and start talking to each other because of the technology that blockchain provides.

So far, the protocol shows promise as demonstrated through some interesting applications that Manzi has spearheaded. Earlier this year, the company partnered with Vanderbilt University to create a biometric suit that can track a persons vital signs and, by extension, mental health. The suit, made using 3D printers and containing various sensors that communicate with one another on Beyond Protocol, was tested on stage by lead singer of the band Cage the Elephant Matt Schultz as part of his campaign to raise awareness for mental health. Though it looks like a cross between medieval chainmail and a futuristic spacesuit, Schultz is able to jump on stage without hindrance.

Beyond Protocol x @CageTheElephant

Matthew Ray Shultz, frontman of CTE, which won Best Rock Alum at the 2020 Grammys, dons a 3D printed suit produced in collaboration with @beyondprotocol1 that measures his biometric information, and allows developers to build apps on top of it pic.twitter.com/9OOssJSakq

— Beyond Protocol (@beyondprotocol1) October 3, 2021

Its a good way to illustrate how blockchain can be used with data coming off of devices, Manzi says. He goes on to explain the cybersecurity value of using blockchain to validate the signatures of individual devices to protect against hacking.

Further, he adds that blockchain integration allows for the entire dataset to be cross-validated in such a way that knows which devices have accessed which data and, by extension, which has had access to specific pieces of information. This allows for a higher capacity in privacy protection, at least in theory, because such an arrangement can ensure that unauthorized components can not and have not gained access to specific data. This, however, can represent a double-edged sword because it is conceivable that the full tracking data could end up in the wrong hands after it is uploaded onto a computer.

The true purpose of the suit comes from the data which, when collected and combined, can result in the building of customized applications to benefit the wearer. Developers can come in and say to Matt, here are some different applications that I can build based on your vitals, Manzi explains.

Lets say hes getting a little agitated. The biometric suit could trigger a vibrating pulse to the wrist area to suggest that he, for example, calms his breathing down, Manzi explains regarding the suits function.

Functions like these carry potential benefits in areas including mental health, with Manzi adding that performers face immense stress while on tour and the ability to track stress levels can be beneficial doubly so for someone like Schultz who has a history of battling depression and is now active in promoting good mental health.

How cool would it be if such a suit could be used in conjunction with a metaverse avatar, such as one created using thePolish Elon Musks portal to the Metaverseor even one performing in a 3D Animal Concert?

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Talking cars

Another recent proof of concept can be found in Manzis co-founder Benics native Slovenia, where Beyond Protocol has partnered with the European Union Commission to set up an eBike charging station outside Parliament in Ljubljana.

(1/3) Beyond Protocol's technology has been selected to power European Union green initiative. Alongside partners, Beyond Protocol has deployed an eBike solar powered station in Slovenia, with a systems architecture built from blockchain technology. The station is located in… pic.twitter.com/RLvG32IB8O

— Beyond Protocol (@beyondprotocol1) November 19, 2021

What makes these bikes special is that they are more than mere electrical devices that blindly charge when plugged in but, instead, are individuals that can independently communicate with the charger.

The bike to identify itself with hardware and when it goes up to a charger, say Hey, this is ___ type of bike therefore I need ___ type of charging it should happen at ___ charging rate and here are my billing details.

This bike charging concept is currently being scaled out to electric vehicle charging stations in Slovenia. We started looking at the electric vehicle infrastructure in Europe and we determined that we can develop these charging stations where the cars can pull up to them and seamlessly pay for electricity, Manzi explains. Each car is given a unique identity with which the driver can connect their Stripe account as one connects to a wireless speaker.

When the car connects to an electric charging port, it identifies the charging stations wallet address via Bluetooth and pays automatically for the electricity it receives. Validation is the key word the integrated Beyond Protocol blockchain allows the machines to seamlessly recognize each other and transact without fear of imposters.

This means that stealing your credit card would not be enough for an identity thief to buy gas at the pumps theyd need to steal your car, too.

Though Manzi initially considered having payments settle in Beyond Protocols native tokenBP, he came to the conclusion that initial adoption would be more seamless when allowing for fiat payments through Stripe, where, for example, a credit card can be used as a source of funding instead of crypto.

Despite the initial lack of utilization, Manzi sees future use cases for the BP token as like a natural resource for this new economy of devices waking up and starting to communicate with each other in all these new ways that cant necessarily even be imagined right now. He says that is likely to include a role interacting between cars and charging stations in practice.

It allows us to do what we do great, and thats provide the car with the identity and the charging station the identity and allow them to transfer value.

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Robert Gryn is a serial entrepreneur who has built a high-tech Metaverse scanner which he hopes will act as a portal from our physical reality into the Metaverse.

It is no secret that the physical world is beginning to merge with the digital, and that blockchain is serving as the arbiter of reality in many of these nascent metaverses. Gryn, CEO of MetaHero, is doing his part to make that new reality as real as possible, creating high-definition 3D scans of people, objects and animals that you may soon encounter in games, virtual worlds and NFTs.

After spending a decade building European marketing company Codewise in Poland and even being featured on a Forbes list for the nations richest, Gryn left it all behind and moved to Dubai while building a solution with which he hopes to onboard the next billion people to the blockchain.

Privacy worries

Gryn excitedly lists the potential applications of his full-body Metaverse scanners for things like digital fashion: Youll be able to scan yourself in your underpants, for example itd be very easy to try on not only digital fashion but real-world clothing, he says.

But, this raises a serious concern. What if some privacy box is left unchecked or the system is hacked and I find my digital clone as the unwilling star of an AI-created adult video?

Is this my eternal form? I got scanned into the metaverse by @Metahero_io at Dubai's Future Blockchain Summit last October. #Cointelegraph article coming soon! @wdw_io #metaverse #HERO pic.twitter.com/ItPEjnMNw5

— Elias Ahonen.eth (@eahonen) February 16, 2022

Gryn recognizes the issue, admitting that if ultra-realistic scans got leaked and someone manipulated them to be in some sort of pornographic scene, that would potentially be the beginning of the end for us. For that reason, he stresses the importance of secure file storage and the use of security measures such as watermarks.

Storing and managing high-resolution 3D scans of thousands of people is no easy technical feat, and it can also be a nightmare of privacy and copyright laws. The tech raises plenty of questions: Who can be given access to scans, how can they be used and how do royalties need to be set up? There are no easy answers.

We are going to have to hire small armies of lawyers to cover all global jurisdictions to figure out what we can and cannot do in any given jurisdiction, Gryn says, adding that the management of terabytes of new data on a daily basis is no small challenge but one he is confident he will overcome.

Making the rich list

Originally from Poland, Gryn started out in an eclectic kind of course studying for a Master of Science in technology entrepreneurship at the University of Surrey in England from 2004 to 2008, where each week, they would invite a local entrepreneur to share their life story and answer questions about their business. One such presenter once told the class that of 100 people who want to start a business, only four actually do and just one of them succeeds. Gryn recalls pondering how he could avoid the 96% fate of a wantrepreneur and strike out for real. After graduating, he continued with a masters in marketing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

He realized early on he was not cut out to be a corporate drone, during an internship at mobile network company Orange, where he received an employee number and access to the groups intranet on the first day. Browsing the boring corporate intranet all day, it was very obvious to me that I dont belong there, and I dont want to belong. As he began his second day, nobody came along to give him work, and during lunch, I decided just to bail and never ever allow myself to be part of this corporate type of structure, he recalls with a laugh.

With the exception of his two-day stint there and another minor internship, Gryns first job was one of his own entrepreneurial makings as CEO of Codewise, a marketing company which he founded in Krakow, Poland in 2011. Using technology to help manage the brand marketing of various clients, the firm has ranked among Europes fastest-growing companies for three years in a row.

Each year, he remembers browsing the Polish edition of the Forbes magazine when they released an annual list of societys wealthiest, where he would always be looking for someone young that made it in a country that does quite the opposite of facilitating entrepreneurship. Later, undue bureaucracy and a post-communist mentality which he says is prevalent in Eastern Europe influenced his decision to relocate to Dubai which he considers more business-friendly.

He made it, building the firm into a 250-person IT company in the advertising technology space. At age 31 in 2017, he was featured as the youngest self-made man on the Forbes list of richest Poles with a fortune estimated at about $150 million.

But Gryn was not quite happy, describing that he felt as if he were living in like a golden cage that I had built and the door was open. He was suffering from burnout by 2018, and I wanted the company to be out of my life, he recounts.

In 2020, he sold the company in order to start new.

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Discovering Crypto

After moving on from the company he had spent a decade building, Gryn saw crypto as the rabbit hole most worthy of his newfound time and money.

I had always been crypto-curious, but to go fully down the rabbit hole you need quite a bit of headspace to wrap your head around it.

He came to an interesting conclusion. Crypto is probably the most important technology of modern mankind that will level the playing field in every single possible imaginable aspect namely giving people financial freedom, he proclaimed.

As he continued exploring the industry, he found most crypto projects to be very crypto-centric, and difficult for those outside of the industry to comprehend in any practical way. As he saw it, it didnt all need to be related to DeFi or even to money. Seeing the idea of cryptocurrency as still unapproachable to most, Gryn felt strongly that not enough was being done to bring in the next billion people to crypto. A task he reasoned would be best accomplished through the gaming and entertainment sector.

For Gryn, mass adoption of crypto is about building a more equitable future for the next generation, he explains convincingly enough, considering he brings up his newborn son as an inspiration for helping create a better tomorrow, something he says can pretty much only be done with technology. Brainstorming on a way to combine his capital, network and background as a gamer, he came to the idea of MetaHero a project allowing anyone to create a 3D avatar of themselves in the Metaverse.

Mysterious ways

Unlike many entrepreneurs who brag of the endless hustle, Gryn describes himself as possessing a natural laziness inherent to all humans. At Codewise, he used unconventional business methods such as renting out office spaces which he could not reasonably afford in order to force himself to keep the business growing. One time, after signing the lease for a new space, he looked at the company balance sheets and thought holy crap, if we dont double our revenue and profit, theres no way we can pay for this office, he tells me.

I’m kind of an entrepreneur that just goes for it puts on my blinders and just blocks out all the fear and uncertainty and just goes for it.

Another method for success is one he calls conference-driven development, in which you book a very, very expensive conference or trade show a few months in the future and then you promise to deliver X, Y and Z and even if that seems impossible, you make it possible. This was apparently the case for Dubais Future Blockchain Summit, where, with me bearing witness, Gryn launched his scanner to great fanfare and amazement after only months of development.

I figured out quite early that if I put myself in the position where I have no choice but to succeed, then I will succeed, he says with infectious confidence.

The scanner

He called up his friend the Polish Elon Musk Mariusz Krl, CEO of 3D printing and scanning company Wolf Digital World, and suggested a partnership through which to scan our reality into the Metaverse. Krls company has been working on 3D photogrammetric technology for eight years, and the entrepreneurs set out to build a scanner made of 200 Sony cameras, 1,500 meters of wiring and 20 computer units. When the team demonstrated their scanners, which are each capable of 150,000 scans per year to Sony, they were amazed, as they didn’t even know that something like that could be done with their own equipment, Gryn recalls.

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Heres how it works: The scanned item, whether a human, cow or object, is placed in the center of the scanner. The lights shine from every direction to evenly illuminate every surface while the hundreds of cameras capture a simultaneous image from all angles. These are then spliced together by high-powered imaging software in order to create a realistic 3D image that can be inserted into any digital space, whether social media, a video game or the metaverse. It might be a perfect way for a performer to create a lifelike avatar in which to perform at an Animal Concert in the Metaverse, for example.

Were going to build the largest database of 3D scanned people and objects in the world, Gryn explains, regarding his vision. He sees this as an important step for the building of the Metaverse, adding that creating a hyper-realistic in-game character that resembles a human, with blemishes and everything is a difficult and expensive task. Once you build a database of hundreds of thousands of scan items and people, the use-cases for that are so limitless that sometimes it boggles your mind, he says excitedly.

Over four days at @dxbontheblock, we scanned over 300 incredible people, transferring them to the metaverse. We've also captured their impressions and opinions about this unique experience, to show all those who couldnt be with us at the conference what its like to be scanned. pic.twitter.com/ydYqs3aRks

— Wolf Digital World (@wdw_io) October 27, 2021

As far as he knows, no comparable 3D scanner exists unless maybe theres a more advanced one somewhere in a top-secret basement in Hollywood. Especially notable, according to him, is the scanners speed which means were able to do scans so quickly that were able to capture practically any animal and import it into the Metaverse say, your dog, Gryn explains.

Metahero scanners are meant eventually to be available around the world, with scans payable in Hero tokens which were launched in July. The tokens exist on BNB Chain in large part due to high fees on the Ethereum network. While some have gone to investors, a portion is earmarked to provide incentives for people of various walks of life to be scanned as bonuses, in addition to the potential royalties they might earn from the use of their images.

1% of the total supply or hero token is dedicated to paying the first 100,000 people $1,000 equivalent in our token to get scans you get paid to get scanned, Gryn boasts.

Though Gryn envisions a future where mass adoption of the Metaverse could see people earning their livelihoods just based on their 3D avatars that they can monetize in various ways, he admits that the future is not quite yet not when it comes to realistic Metaverse avatars.

This is because todays Metaverse applications do not support the high-definition available through Wolf Digital Worlds scanner. For this reason, were building technology to allow you to scale down quality because 16k is not going to be supported for the next maybe 5 or 10 years, he says.

10 years down the road, the Metaverse will likely be almost indistinguishable from our everyday reality something that you log on to and have your own space there, your NFTs, your artwork, your apartment.

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Robbie Heegers Endaoment has facilitated the donation of over $30 million of cryptocurrency to 243 different charities. These donations come from altruistic cryptocurrency investors who are also partly motivated by reducing their tax burdens to Uncle Sam and keeping more of their profits.

Born in Silicon Valley, Heeger, now in his early 30s, was exposed to entrepreneurship from a young age. Though he initially worked in big tech, he soon became so enthralled with blockchain that he dropped everything to pursue his new passion in 2018. This led him to create Endaoment, which he calls the first regulatory-compliant nonprofit built entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. The project allows anyone to donate one of over 150 cryptocurrencies to a charity of their choice and, in doing so, reduce their tax liabilities.

Endaoment represents the latest generation of blockchain giving but it is not the first. In 2017, a mysterious figure calling themselves Pine anonymously donated 5057 Bitcoin, worth $55 million at the time, to a collection of over 60 charities.

These donations not only encouraged major charities to accept cryptocurrency contributions for the first time but also served to counteract the perception of Bitcoin being primarily used in dishonest or criminal activities. While the Pineapple Fund helped legitimize cryptocurrency as a medium of charity, it was by no means the first. As early as 2011, Bruno Kuinskasin created Bitcoin 100, an initiative to donate Bitcoin to charities that would openly accept BTC.

Despite many charities early exposure to cryptocurrency, few have continued to receive substantial donations on the blockchain and many even removed such donation options from their websites. The reason was simple on one level and yet complex by nature taxes.

Endaoment

Upon graduating from university in 2012, Heeger accepted a full-time position with Apple where he first worked as a content publishing quality assurance engineer before becoming a manager of production operations. As his career progressed, his fascination with blockchain technology grew and in 2018, he left Apple with this understanding that crypto was not just something that I could be tangentially interested in anymore it was consuming. Despite his experience at a major tech company, he saw himself as technically weak and took boot camp-style classes in solidity coding and blockchain web development.

I started brainstorming ways that I could take this new skill set and try and build something that would funnel crypto capital into non-profit organizations that otherwise would have had very little exposure to crypto, Heeger recounts of his early days. One of his initial ideas was to create a media chain by which to verify news content and make it resistant to censorship.

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The brainstorming paid off, as he recalled how he had made it a habit to give away a portion of his Apple stock to a donor-advised fund each year because he had stock that had tax obligations on it and I wanted to give that stock away without having to sell it first. Charity can, of course, be more than simply selfless giving, as strategic donations can often allow for both individuals and businesses to reduce their tax burdens. While selling AAPL stock before donating it would have incurred additional capital gains taxes, giving the stock to a donor-advised fund allowed him to receive tax benefits for the entire value of the stock without incurring capital gains taxes, as charitable donor-advised funds are not liable to tax.

I had crypto that had appreciated significantly and I didnt want to sell it first in order to donate it. I thought wouldnt it be cool if there was a donor-advised fund that took crypto and that was the seed that became Endaoment.

Heeger, now in his early 30s, founded Endaoment in March 2019. Its core function is to provide a tax receipt in exchange for a donation of cryptocurrency. As a donor-advised fund, those making donations receive advisory privileges which means that they can suggest where they would like the proceeds of their cryptocurrency to be donated. In practice, this means that 99% of the time, funds go to the donors desired U.S. charity of which Heeger says there are about 2.5 million. The 1% of times when the funds do not reach the donors first choice of destination include situations where the grant recommendation is to a hate group or an organization thats not in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service, or one that presents some conflict of interest for the organization, Heeger explains.

Give us your crypto and we will give you a tax receipt that says you donated it to a 501C3 tax-exempt non-profit public benefit corporation called Endaoment, he clarifies regarding the business model.

Thank you for the bids on Grifter #659. One of three rats in the collection and without doubt the most pretty.
All proceeds will go to the Grifter Fund in collaboration with @endaomentdotorg
Check out all the auctions: https://t.co/hpSUANo3Dl pic.twitter.com/OJ5Ktei1QB

— XCOPY (@XCOPYART) December 23, 2021

Heres how it works in numbers

Suppose Fred bought 1000 ETH at $3 for $3,000. At $3,000 per ETH, he now has $3 million worth. Presuming a 33.33% capital gains tax, he would owe the government about $1 million upon sale, being left with $2 million for himself. Alternatively, he could choose to donate 250 ETH to Endaoment, which would issue him a tax receipt for the equivalent of the $750,000 donation which would count against and fully cancel out his $750,000 tax liability when selling the remaining 750 ETH, meaning he would be left with $2.25 million, with $750,000 sent to the charity of his choice and zero going to the IRS.

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The talk of the IRS reveals a bottleneck: In order to maintain its status as a U.S. tax-exempt public interest corporation, Endaoment can only issue grants to 501C3 charities registered with U.S. authorities. This means that while many local charities outside the U.S. would not be valid recipients of donations, various international causes can still be targeted as many of the charities act globally.

Weve done a lot of work in Sub-Saharan Africa and Afghan refugee relief, and donations toorganizationsthat do work in Europe and all over the world that just have US 501C3 entities that they use as fundraising vehicles for donors in the U.S., Heeger clarifies.

Though Heeger notes that he cannot solicit services to people outside of the U.S., people outside the United States have used the Endaoment software to make crypto donations for which they receive U.S. tax receipts just as any American would. Success in getting tax deductions in such international cases is far from guaranteed, and Heeger notes that not all countries issue tax deductions on the basis of charitable giving. Many users have asked about the possibility of creating tax receipts that meet the requirements of various governments, as the tax systems of many countries consider self-directed donations as societally desirable and therefore encourage them by granting tax reductions based on registered donations.

Weve seen people in Japan, in Australia, in the U.K. and in France come and use the site in order to effect impact They have taken on the burden of figuring out how they prove the deductibility with their local regulators themselves.

Heeger sees many opportunities for future expansion including to charities in other countries which he believes would upgrade the number of options from 2.5 to over 7 million charitable organizations. It is clear that his mind has never left Silicon Valley, as he characterizes the project as a minimum viable product that supports straightforward crypto giving of any crypto asset to any U.S. nonprofit as dollars.

Born in Silicon Valley

Heeger grew up in Californias Palo Alto in the early 2000s, which he describes as an intense and highly competitive environment where various parents of his classmates would show up on keynotes for the iPhone or some Google service. The setting made for an environment with lots of access to and encouragement to use and experiment with new technologies, with tech companies often using the schools he went to as testing grounds for new products.

Driven by a passion for storytelling, in 2008, Heeger began studies in broadcast and digital journalism at the University of Southern California. He specialized in publishing technology, inspired by what he saw as a disruption of the legacy media institutions by the internet causing a change in the way people got information. He also grew interested in ethics such as the need to balance profitability and the journalistic duty of honest reporting. Soon, he found himself running iTunes social media channels as an Apple intern.

I really loved the triangle of business, technology and ethics, and having to try and find balance between those three key drivers journalism had that in spades.

Throughout his studies, he worked for the campus TV news station, where he eventually oversaw 25 reporters and other staff as a multimedia director. In 2010, Heeger had a real eye-opener when he traveled to Tanzania to volunteer as an English teacher at a rural town on the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro through an organization called Cross-Cultural Solutions. Though he looked for teaching methods that would help the children gear up for their future in a competitive world, he saw that providing a Palo Alto-style education was a challenge when youre trying to do work in a space thats chronically underfunded.

2021 was a breakout year for @endaomentdotorg, from major gifts , to #NFT powered #philanthropy , to fiscal sponsorships and beyond!

Learn about the community behind nearly $30 million in #CryptoPhilanthropy in our full Annual Impact Report: https://t.co/OYAKGgFc3v pic.twitter.com/rd8OD3Nxuk

— endaoment.eth ETHDenver (@endaomentdotorg) January 19, 2022

Anonymous donors

One case in which Endaoment is unable to issue tax receipts is when the donor is fully anonymous. Though anonymous donations can be accepted and Heeger notes that many religions will say that the anonymous giver is the most righteous kind of giver because they dont expect anything in return, only a very small percentage of donors fit that category.

Heeger explains that there are various degrees of anonymity when it comes to donating such as whether the donor wants to be unknown to only the receiving charity or to Endaoment as well. When sending crypto from an address with an ENS name, for example, it may be easy for anyone tracking transactions to deduce who the donor is, though the receiving charity itself will not see such information. If funds are routed directly from an exchange, Heeger says that not even Endaoment has any way to figure out the identity of the donor. In such cases, he often checks with the organization to ensure that they are comfortable receiving anonymous money.

In one example of semi-anonymous giving, the developers of SushiSwap donated $1 million SUSHI, with each donation being labeled as being from the SushiSwap core developers rather than from any particular individual.

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Journey to DAO

In the future, he says Endaoment will support complex investment strategies and international giving. These strategies would include the gauntlet of crypto-assets like NFTs, vote-locked tokens and interest-bearing tokens. You should be able to give whatever it is that you want to give and direct those proceeds to an issue that you care about, he emphasizes.

What Endaoment is not yet, despite the name, is a DAO. That is meant to change soon, however, as Heegers plan is that people who are actively advancing the mission of Endoament are rewarded with tokens that give them membership, interest and oversight power over the nonprofit entity itself. This would make EnDAOment a decentralized autonomous organization, which comes with the Web3 dream of leveraging a community to make happen what no small centralized team could ever do.

Soon, Heeger imagines that it will be easy for anyone to become the next Pine, even on a much smaller budget, and create a fund through which they and others use to distribute their crypto wealth to charities around the world.

We want to democratize those philontrophic tools and make them as easy as interacting with a DeFi Protocol or as easy as transacting using MetaMask.

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Are future prices written in the stars? Meet Maren Altman, presciently named for cryptocurrency, who combines astrology and day trading crypto into a winning blend.

In 1973, Princeton University professor Burton Malkiel published his book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, in which he famously states that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspapers financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.

Fast forward to 2013, and Rob Arnott, CEO of Research Affiliates, conducted research mimicking monkeys using AI and actually discovered the monkeys had done a much better job than both the experts and the stock market. Closer examination proved the success was a result of the random selection of companies by the monkey approach, optimizing their success. However, it is a sobering thought that not only machines but possibly primates can outperform humans in stock picking.

Its a small step, perhaps, to look at the potential of astrology to determine the future price of Bitcoin. Unlike a stock, whose performance is dictated by both the business performance of a company and the sector in which it operates, technical analysts predictions for Bitcoin price movements depend on reviewing charts and patterns similar to that performed by astrologists.

In the gutter, looking at the stars

So, how do you predict the price of Bitcoin with astrology? Enter Maren Altman, who calls herself your personal poet to the stars, especially on TikTok, and has made a name for herself over the last two years by using astrology to predict price but not without attracting some controversy.

I was always the weird girl who asked people about their star signs. In college, I used to earn pocket money by doing peoples charts at parties. I have always been fascinated by astrology.

It was a natural fit for Altman to run Bitcoin through the charts, using the genesis block as the birth date after all, anything with a birth date can be plugged into the astrology charts. Altman bought some Bitcoin back in 2017 but had largely forgotten about it until she became interested again in March 2020 when she was studying philosophy at NYU, along with the rest of the student population nothing like a good pandemic and soaring price to grab interest.

I grew up with astrology where patterns and cycles are tracked. I was also familiar with financial astrology, so it just made sense to apply it to cryptocurrency, says Altman.

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Thats a big call

One of her first notable calls was in January 2021, where she observed that the new moon in Capricorn, on Jan. 13, looked big for Bitcoin. She went on to predict a dip followed by a bull run. Her call was prescient, with Bitcoin continuing to double in price before April. To counter that, she predicted all-time highs in May, with largely unremarkable success, and Bitcoin floundering instead in its first notable dip of 2021.

Becoming a day trader proved profitable for Altman, but it was not without its stresses.

It was not enough to call the price; I had to be able to execute, she says. And, some days, I made mistakes and lost money, but it was not the fault of the charts but my errors.

She sees astrology as a giant mirror where certain signifiers of planetary alignments represent themes such as world growth, or even world aggression or peace. By reading those patterns and overplaying them on what has already happened, she can trace future movements or, in the case of cryptocurrency, prices.

Altman acknowledges that it can be hard to read the charts there is a system of patterns but also multiple cycles that can result in misreading. Having said that, she is still ahead of the game.

Either way, I am 100% transparent with my trades. I share everything, she says.

She began trading and posting on social media in earnest in the summer of 2020, and today, she has more than a million followers on TikTok and more than 2 million combined on all her socials.

It just blew up over the summer of 2020, Altman explains.

When asked why she gained such traction, Altman shrugs her shoulders.

I am a bit of a character. Im young, Im a woman and I wear mostly red. But, I am also serious, I dont dumb myself down and I make my living though crypto. I guess it just blew up in a perfect storm of weirdness.

Did she predict Jan. 6, or did she just read the newspapers?

It might also be down to her humor and calling both the Biden presidential win and the Jan. 6, 2021 uprising, although political majors might have achieved similar success through reading the papers.

She also picked up a number of high-profile features in tier-one publications such as The Washington Post, Reuters and The New Yorker not magazines that frequently publicize highly improbable predictions.

Scrolling through her popular TikToks at one point when talking about flipping NFTs, she explains that she put a down payment on an apartment in Dubai by flipping one NFT. Its pretty inspirational.

Mostly, though, her income is through her trading, and she is reluctant to do much monetization of her socials.

Ive been hesitant to partner with paid sponsors because everyone in crypto hates people that monetize their socials. Its just not done, she explains.

She has written several articles for crypto traders and for market analyst Mati Greenspan on his Quantum Economics platform, but she is not directly employed by him.

In other interviews, she points to her Astrology Academy, where she offers astrology training to paying clients. There are about 150 paying clients. She says that she has 1,000 people in her membership community paying between $7 and $50 a month for her teachings.

Charting a course through the storm

At this point, I ask if she has had much pushback. Yes, she has, to the point of having to flee the country because of death threats.

New York was no longer safe for me, and so I went to friends in Dubai, she says.

Altman is back in New York when we speak, but she references the trolling campaign spearheaded by a 2021 article in Rolling Stone where she was called a white supremacist, a racist, homophobic and transphobic, among other things. Worryingly, given her following, it accused her of plagiarism.

There is a lot to unpack in the series of tweets and articles written around this time. BIPOC astrologers in the same field, such as AstroDim, said that Altman had, at first, dissed their commentary that President Biden would die in office but then reposted similar predictions later on.

In other social media flareups, Altman, a vegan, has used inflammatory images and texts in support of her dietary choices. Again, it has caused some backlash.

the more importance you have to say, the more others will misrepresent you & take you out of context.

the key is to remember that what you have to say is more important than shutting up.

— MAREN (@marenaltman) January 7, 2022

The BIPOC astrologers in the same article also maintained that there is a general bias against BIPOC people across social media platforms, targeting TikTok in particular.

The biggest complaint made against Altman by the BIPOC astrologers in that 2021 Rolling Stone article is that when Altman talks about the same topics as they do, she gets more views. That might say more about America than astrology.

Altman apologized in a number of videos about her comments and videos on gender fluidity, trans people and animal/meat eaters before going offline during the Mercury retrograde when she went to Dubai.

According to Altman, she was not trolled by crypto heads but rather spiritual crazies who invented a lot of their claims.

She certainly does attract a lot of attention good and bad and there is even a Twitter account presenting an archive of her more standout tweets where she claims, among other things, that artificial insemination for dairy cows is a form of sexual assault.

Promoting disordered eating as well as an ongoing moral superiority complex pic.twitter.com/BImU7tO5Lf

— maren altman tweets (@marenaltmantwe1) February 9, 2021

Altman says she went to the police when the threats escalated and now has security.

A thread: #astrotwitter 2 nights ago I was shocked to see Maren Altman tweet she has a legal team handling the recent incident involing her and the rest of the astro community, it wasn't a good look…

— Jalin (@C_Jalin) February 12, 2021

What we know for certain if you believe in the charts, however, is that she is assured of more success in her future.

Not famous, as that is a very loaded word, but I always knew I would be successful. Funnily enough, my own astrology charts are entirely focused on finance, and it never made sense to me until now.

In time, Ill move away from day trading and into angel investing, but I need to build my capital first.

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As Ethereum gas prices rise, the chain that inspired Web3 is becoming gentrified, with high transaction costs pushing less wealthy users onto competing blockchains or scaling solutions.

This means that many use cases are becoming unfeasible in the proverbial layer-one downtown, and suburban neighborhoods are being developed to allow for a cost-effective layer-two blockchain experience.

Since getting acquainted with Polygon around the time of its launch in late 2019, Sameep Singhania has been an avid supporter of projects built on the protocol. In 2021, he created QuickSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) serving the needs of the budding Polygon ecosystem.

Singhania left a promising career as a software developer in 2017 to work as a freelance developer, only to find himself writing code for an array of blockchain projects in the DeFi and layer-two sector. Among the many projects he worked on, he spent 18 months with blockchain e-commerce site OpenBazaar, and served as lead developer for DeFi exchange ParaSwap.

Polygon is one layer-two solution built on Ethereum, and it offers users lower fees when transacting on-chain. QuickSwap is Polygons primary DEX and functions as a heart of the network.

A DEX for Polygon

After working on perhaps dozens of projects on Polygon from 2019 onward, Singhania realized that to grow the Polygon ecosystem, we need a DEX.

This was because while 99% of blockchain projects have a token, listings on popular exchanges are not easy to arrange, and many users are not willing to create an account at an obscure exchange just to trade a particular token that is not listed elsewhere. A DEX can function as the central market square of a blockchain network, giving its users access to everything they need without having to venture to another chain.

Singhania recalls being encouraged to create a DEX by Polygons co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, who put him in touch with Roc Zacharias, a marketer with Lunar Digital Assets. That’s how we set up a team we had developers, we had a marketing team, a perfect mix, and we launched the app, he explains.

Polygon previously called Matic Network, with MATIC remaining its ticker is a layer-two blockchain. That means its a blockchain built on top of an existing chain. Whereas Lighting is an example of a layer-two, or L2, built on Bitcoin, Polygon is built upon Ethereum. As a result, Polygon-based tokens can be sent to Ethereum addresses, whose users can retrieve them simply by switching to the Polygon network on a DApp such as MetaMask.

The oft-stated advantage of L2 solutions is that they are more nimble than their behemoth parents, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions. With Bitcoin transactions costing over $10 and taking approximately 10 minutes for the first of six confirmations, it is clear that transacting on the parent chain is not practical for everyday transactions in El Salvador, for example, where laborers can earn as little as $100 per month. Instead, Salvadorans use Bitcoin Lighting, whose transactions cost as little as 1 satoshi.

The transaction costs on the Ethereum network are much higher, making it unusable by the small users who are effectively priced out of using DeFi solutions or decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. In January 2021, a normal Ethereum transaction on Uniswap cost around $100, Singhania recalls.

If Im a normal user and I want to do a small trade, I cannot do it on Ethereum the average transaction size on Uniswap is somewhere around $50,000.

Polygon is there to scale Ethereum, Singhania says, which has its pros and cons. He further explains that while Ethereum is the most secure solution out there, it comes at the cost of high gas fees and relatively slow transaction times.

Thats not exactly desirable for an economy smaller denominations of currency exist because not everything can be done with $100 bills. L2s are the answer for allowing smaller transactions on existing networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. On Polygon, users can exchange Ethereum-based tokens, NFTs, and interact with smart contracts cheaply.

LIVE NOW: @mcuban, @hackapreneur, @CryptoRocky, @AaveAave, & @0xPolygonspeak on Polygon Power Hour!

– @mcuban "People are probably a whole lot more active on Aave and QuickSwap on Polygon, than Ethereum L1 versions" – Mark Cubanhttps://t.co/99rGSoa04U pic.twitter.com/ySjxu049td

— QuickSwap (@QuickswapDEX) June 15, 2021

The pressing need for L2s is relatively new, because transaction costs have risen significantly in the past two years along with the blockchain user base. On QuickSwap, transactions between the over 23,000 available pairs cost only a few cents. You can basically use QuickSwap to trade any ERC-20 token which has liquidity and exists on the Polygon network, Singhania says. Fees are naturally paid in MATIC.

Considering the savings, switching digital assets from Ethereum to Polygon seems like an obvious solution for many users. However, some activities, like the trading of six-figure NFTs, remain decisively away from the Polygonian suburb. Similarly, Singhania acknowledges that those making million-dollar trades have less to gain from Polygon.

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There are two primary ways to move assets to Polygon, according to Singhania: exchange withdrawals and bridges. A lot of big exchanges like Binance support deposits and withdrawals on the Polygon network, which means that the Ethereum network can potentially be avoided entirely. As for assets already on Ethereum instead of on a centralized exchange, they can be bridged, which is effectively an inter-blockchain transfer.

Both L1 and L2 applications have their own pros and cons and they both have their use cases now it’s up to the user to choose which platform better suits their needs

Learning the ropes

Singhania, 31, grew up in India’s capital, New Delhi. He had an early passion for coding since high school, describing the process of coding like magic happening, whereby wonderful stuff could be created with just a few lines of code. He followed his passion in 2008 to JSS Academy of Technical Education, on the outskirts of the capital, where he completed a bachelor in computer science and served as a campus IBM Ambassador.

Graduating in 2013, he began his career in software testing and automation at Dell, but soon realized that he wanted to focus more on development instead of remaining a software tester, a role with less opportunities for creative input, for the remainder of his career. He made the switch to software developer in 2015 at Drishti-soft Solutions, where he worked on customer service software and organized web development training sessions.

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Still not quite settled in the role and in search of something where I dont get bored, Singhania switched over to software freelancing in 2017. When you do freelancing, you get to know a lot of people and learn about a lot of new industries and domains, he recalls, noting that he was finally interested in his work. One of these new industries was blockchain, which he had previously heard about while working as a developer.

I again came across this blockchain and Bitcoin stuff while searching for a project, so I decided to give it some more time and do some more research to figure out what is this Bitcoin? What is this blockchain?

By mid-2018, Singhania was a full-time blockchain engineer for a number of projects, including Akila Labs, Bitgrit, and Toptal, where he developed ERC-20 tokens and smart contracts for things like airdrops, token vesting and crowdsales. Notable among this was 18 months spent working with the decentralized marketplace startup OpenBazaar, which was trying to build something very similar to Amazon but on blockchain using the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Singhania recalls with excitement.

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Compounding knowledge

When DeFi was just starting in 2018, Singhania worked as the lead developer and first employee of ParaSwap, an aggregator DApp which brings together multiple DEXs so that users can seamlessly trade cryptocurrency pairs which do not exist together on any exchange. All of this trading is done through Singhanias smart contracts, which handle millions of dollars everyday, he says proudly, adding that the platform saw 3.3 billion dollars in volume in the past month.

That project allowed me to make an entry into DeFi it basically introduced me to everything out there like Uniswap, Bancor, Kyber Network, because to build ParaSwap we needed to learn everything about DeFi.

With DeFi under his belt, Singhania encountered layer-two blockchain solutions while working on a dice game for one of his clients, a blockchain casino.

He soon realized that it was too expensive to do it on Ethereum even though 2019 gas fees were a fraction of what they are today. Something new was needed, and Singhania started exploring for layer-two solutions, he recounts. He first built his dice game on the now defunct layer-one Loom Network which shut down shortly thereafter, Singhania scouted out Matic Network, which was in late 2019 very new and their mainnet was not launched. Working with the Matic Network team, now called Polygon, Singhania got the dice game up and running, becoming acquainted with the Polygon network in the process.

Ethereum dice games are not the first to suffer from scaling issues. Erik Voorhees SatoshiDICE, for example, was launched in 2012 and soon accounted for over half of Bitcoin transactions. With transaction prices increasing, making small on-chain bets on Bitcoins main layer has since become impractical.

.@QuickswapDEX has shown tremendous growth on Polygon PoS & has become the biggest Polygon-native decentralized application in terms of users, TVL, & volume.

Were offering them $1m in liquidity mining incentives to strengthen the platforms liquidity

:https://t.co/Z3fb8BOCmw pic.twitter.com/gHN9ZL89U6

— Polygon | $MATIC (@0xPolygon) September 30, 2021

Onboarding the next generation

Now that Polygon is a low-cost option to L1 and has a reliable DEX, Singhania believes that the next step in scaling the layer is to improve the user experience in order to make it user-friendly for millions of people who are new to cryptocurrency. As QuickSwap is a central point of the Polygon ecosystem, much of the responsibility falls to his shoulders.

The way that things are designed right now, it’s not for a novice it’s for a well-trained crypto user.

In Singhanias view, the price of MATIC can be expected to follow the adoption of the Polygon layer. If the team continues to execute, it is just a matter of time as to when prices might begin a steady climb. One thing is clear: Singhania is no longer bored with his work and is not doing any kind of freelancing because I don’t have time.

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