We’re now halfway through the semester of our second year. So far, we’ve seen explosive growth, widespread interest in Web3 on campus, and have had the opportunity to place several of our students in jobs. Let’s take a look at some of our accomplishments from the first half of this semester, our roadmap for the second half, and some more exciting announcements along the way.

This year, our membership has exploded, and we’re now one of the larger organizations on campus with over 200 students, making us one of the largest blockchain clubs in the country, especially at our university’s size. This is a near-100% increase from last year and demonstrates that Vandy students are still interested in building and learning, even in a bear market.

As you may have noticed by now, we also have recently gone through a full rebrand! We look forward to revamping our social media presence, getting new merch, and growing alongside our new branding.

We started the year with a guest speaker who flew all the way from Chicago to speak to Vanderbilt students about what it’s like to be a Web3 founder – Sam Thapaliya. Sam founded Zebec, a continuous settlement protocol, and gave students advice about founding a company in the blockchain industry. This was a joint event with VINES, Vanderbilt’s entrepreneurial society, and was a fantastic way to start the semester.

A few weeks later we had an education-focused speaker series with recruiters from Deloitte as well as Jake DiBattista, who talked about his company EduCoin and its initiatives to bring education into the Web3 space.

In late October, about a week after the Ethereum Merge, we were honored to host Preston Van Loon, co-founder of Prysmatic Labs and Ethereum Core Developer, to speak about his experience making the Merge a reality. Special thanks to the Ethereum Foundation for sponsoring this event as part of their “Road to the Merge” series. Thanks to their generosity, we were able to cater Chick-fil-A and provide Vanderbilt Blockchain swag to attendees.

We pride ourselves on our ability to serve people at any level of blockchain knowledge and are excited to have partnered with Lirn.io to create a series of quizzes with on-chain learning verification. Check them out here!

We’re also excited to announce the creation of our research committee this semester. We chose around a dozen students to create our “genesis cohort” which will be responsible for creating an on-chain Vanderbilt Blockchain Index on Polygon. The Index will be fee-free and will be finalized in about a week on Polygon. In the future, we hope to expand to have several different indices each representing a different risk level or portfolio style.

This semester, we are also pleased to continue our development committee, where we teach a selected cohort of students how to program smart contracts and decentralized applications in Solidity. In the future, we hope to expand to Rust programming as well, but currently do not have the technical capacity or expertise to do so.

Even with our packed schedule from the first half of the semester, we still have big plans for the next few months. Our new content committee will be responsible for maintaining an active social media presence, with an emphasis on decentralized platforms like Lens Protocol (<- follow us!). In fact, we are proud to boast that we were the first university blockchain club whitelisted on Lens and have since led an initiative to get more university organizations and their members on the decentralized social graph.

Additionally, we’re excited to announce that we will be partnering with Underdog Protocol, a Solana-based on-chain reputation protocol, to take attendance at our events and create an on-chain record of Vanderbilt Blockchain-associated events. Students who continuously attend our meetings will not only have their record of knowledge verified and stored on chain but will also be eligible for Vanderbilt Blockchain swag like shirts, stickers, and more.

We’re also excited to support the Wondr’ys initiatives to bring Web3 to Nashville. The Wondr’y is Vanderbilt’s innovation and entrepreneur center and is consistently at the forefront of opportunity in Nashville. Recently, they’ve started a monthly Web3 series with local blockchain experts. Their last event was November 2nd and covered Data Ownership & Royalties in Web3, and the next event will be in early December!

Our president, Lincoln Murr, spoke on a panel at Web3 ATL on Sunday, November 6th. He was joined by Texas Blockchain president and Spawn Founder Jake Levy as well as Pruitt Martin, Founder, and CFO of 404 DAO. His panel discussed the importance of blockchain clubs.

One of our biggest accomplishments is having a 100% success rate in finding job opportunities for our members who are looking to break into the Web3 space. Whether it be by founding a company or joining as an intern, we’ve had great success in securing our members' positions in the blockchain industry. To that end, we plan to host a blockchain job fair with local Nashville companies before the end of the semester with other Vanderbilt organizations like VINES and Change++. It will be a great opportunity for us to live up to our mission of bridging academia with industry.

Thank you to all of our supporters, prior speakers, and members for sticking with us on our journey of becoming the Web3 Hub of the South. Through the passion of our executive board and members, we get closer and closer to reaching our goal every day and look towards a future where Nashville is a center for blockchain innovation.