gm DAOpunks! Let’s get to it while I still have Wi-Fi at the airport…

The Pivot

Between the time I applied for cohort_3, and receiving news that I was one of three DAOpunks that received a grant, something happened. It was a decision I had made abruptly and one that is turning out to have been a great decision.

It was to return back to Japan sooner than I had planned. To work with Bankless Japan at the WebX conference and make a subsequent trip to Seoul for Ethcon and the Korean Blockchain Week side events.

However, I slowly realized during the trip that this decision resulted in me not being able to focus on the main reason I applied for cohort_3: to work on a security training platform for web3, Voyageur.

But the online hackathons I intended to participate in became a much lower priority compared to helping Bankless Japan and get our GG18 grant out the door.

I had a small, chronic level of guilt knowing that the DAOpunks community voted for me because I pitched that I would be working on Voyageur. But instead I was using the funds to offset costs while I worked in Japan and South Korea.

It hasn’t been until this week that I actually started to come to terms with how everything has gone with cohort_3.

I’m Still in the Game

Voyageur was going to be the main reason I would stay in web3. I’m known for teaching about security and I was hungry to start doing some full-stack web development again.

But I learned three things during the past five weeks:

1. Bankless Japan may end up becoming one of main contributions to the web3 ecosystem and is highly aligned with my interests outside of InfoSec

2. The headaches about front-end web development, that largely made me pivot to InfoSec in the first place, are still there

3. I can still contribute to security education without sacrificing point 1 and without having to deal with point 2

So that is why I’m going to de-focus my time in trying to get Voyageur out the door as I had envisioned. Instead I will try to get more security education out into the world through collaborations, my existing writing practice and playing around with ideas during in-person, short hackathons (since I realized online, long ones are not really my thing).

So while I, and likely nobody else, expected my grant to go towards offsetting my time spent in Japan and South Korea, this pivot may end up being a better use of the grant. Security education is still lacking in the industry, as those that voted for me likely agree with, and I do want to help fix that. But being able to help grow Bankless Japan content and accelerating the web3 ecosystem in APAC has become another mission that I want to see through.

cohort_3 is almost over but I can’t wait to see where things end up by the end of 2023.