gm and welcome to my first post in a series covering my journey through DAOpunks cohort_3! I’m still surprised I made it to the top 3 of the cohort but I will do my best to make the most of this opportunity over the next six weeks.

This initial post will likely be lengthier than subsequent ones, as I introduce DAOpunks, why I participated in this cohort, and what I ended up doing during my first week.

WTF is DAOpunks?

DAOpunks is an NFT collection and public goods grant platform that grew out of the creative community we have at BanklessDAO. It’s a mission-driven project that promotes the transition from being a corpRAT in a corporate environment to being a DAOpunk and working in web3 or DAOs.

Besides the NFT part of DAOpunks they also have a grants program that rewards accepted grantees with 1 ETH each. This grant is used to help grantees pursue their respective missions in trying to make the shift to predominantly working in web3 or producing an artifact that is valuable to the ecosystem.

As a DAOpunks holder I participated in the previous cohorts by voting on the individuals I thought should have received a grant. I never entertained the thought of actually applying myself as I had no immediate need to fully transition to working in web3.

Until this year…

Voyageur

Voyageur is security awareness training for web3.

CORPrats working at large companies may be aware of existing security awareness training platforms like KnowBe4, Cofense, Proofpoint and many others. These platforms are used to train employees on cybersecurity concerns and hopefully encourage new behaviours that reduces risk to an organization. These mostly focus on email phishing, malware and social engineering.

As the Education Coordinator at BanklessDAO’s InfoSec Team for 1.5 years, I’ve learned a lot about what the current threat landscape looks like for web3 users and organizations (DAOs, web3 companies and established organizations looking to adopt web3 technologies). In my opinion there isn’t a satisfactory solution to not only teaching this ecosystem about security risks but also to encourage the behaviour change needed for people to remain aware of those risks when the time comes.

Exciting technologies like account abstraction and multi-party computation (MPC) may start to improve the dire situation we are in with security UX. But until then, while we still interact with blockchains in ways that can put us in risky situations, we need more education to help one another avoid falling into traps set by hackers and scammers.

This is why I decided to dust off my development and design skillset, which I did before I entered InfoSec 4 years ago, and start building a platform to encourage web3 users to adopt risk-reducing behaviours when interacting with the ecosystem. I am aiming to have a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) done by the end of the DAOpunks cohort in early September. This happens to coincide with my trip to Seoul for a few conferences there.

I applied for the grant not only for the financial flexibility 1 ETH can bring as I build the MVP. But also to act as a forcing function, as I must write weekly articles for this cohort and have something to show at the end of it. In my case it is the Voyageur MVP, which I also hope to use DAOpunks as a platform to help promote as I develop it throughout the next several weeks.

WebX

I’m affiliated with Bankless Japan and had the chance to work with them for their presence at WebX, a large crypto and web3 conference in Tokyo. We were a media partner with a booth at a key spot in the exhibitor floor and took full advantage of it.

Most of my energy was used to help bring more opportunities to Bankless Japan. But I also kept Voyageur in the back of my mind while talking to specific people as Voyageur was another reason I went to WebX:

• I’m aiming to have the MVP available in English, Japanese and Korean. My last visits to these countries showed me the large potential growth East Asia has in web3. I want to help guide their journey into web3 safely, as there seems to be a lack of deep web3 security content in their native languages (and much of Asia, really)

• I have contacts in Japan and Korea that could help promote, develop and possibly fund Voyageur. It was great to see familiar faces from both countries at WebX and this gave me more motivation to make sure our content is available in their native languages, which could also help to sell to extended contacts.

• Figuring out by talking to those in and out of security as to whether my idea makes sense. While I believe the web3 ecosystem needs something like Voyageur, that may not match reality. But at the very least I met people at WebX that operate in web3 individually, in DAOs and in companies just starting to get into web3 that echoed my sentiment that there is a lack of needed, effective end-user security education in the space

Voyageur: Prologue

One decision I made a few weeks ago was to pause development on Voyageur as I had imagined it could be upon MVP release. This was so that I could develop a concise version of the same concept for Consensys’ Not Another Virtual Hackathon (NAVH).

I have some experience with dapp development, but I’m not a strong buidler. I have participated in a few hackathons this year, including ETHGlobal Waterloo where we won a prize, which helped bring me up to speed on modern dapp development. But I need more experience building a dapp with a more complex architecture.

As NAVH is skewed towards rewarding hacks that use as many Consensys and partner services as possible, I figured this was the best opportunity to learn a lot in a small amount of time. But I didn’t want to work on a project that took time away from Voyageur. Thus I’m working on security education hack that could possibly fit as a learning module in Voyageur. Or actually become Voyageur if it could accomplish the objective better that what I had first imagined.

BUIDL & SHILL

Productivity wise I will be packaging my days into BUIDL mode or SHILL mode.

BUIDL mode is where I’m developing my security project, Voyageur, and the mode I intend to be in for most of the cohort. I will be in SHILL mode for the times when I am attending conferences, where I will be doing product-market fit research and trying to promote Voyageur.

During BUIDL mode I aim to show the process of developing a dapp, which I have some experience in but still very much a novice at. During SHILL mode I will mostly be discussing how I see my security project, Voyageur, fitting in the wider web3 ecosystem and specifically the Asian ecosystem as this is the region I want to focus on past a general English audience.

Week 1 was mostly SHILL mode as I spent most of the week in Tokyo working with Bankless Japan on their presence at the WebX conference. Next week will be my first BUIDL post and where I will talk more about my NAVH version of Voyageur and its design and development process.

Stay tuned…