Decent presents The Builder’s Journey podcast, featuring intimate discussions with the builders behind the most exciting and innovative protocols, products, and communities in Web3.

On his unlikely journey from breakdancing to blockchain…

When I was young, up until high school, I was super into computers, programming, and all that.

[While in high school in a small city in China], I had a moment where I was like, what in the world am I doing programming in the middle of nowhere? I was like, I think I need people. And from that point in time, I started breakdancing.

I had a pretty illustrious breakdancing career for about 12 years professionally. And then in the middle of that, I go to the military - as a Korean male, you have to serve in the military - and while I was there, I met a guy who was a mathematician, and he was talking to me nonstop about Bitcoin for about a year and a half. He kind of convinced me that maybe this is something worth looking into. So I read the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers after I got out of the military and then I was hooked.

There are some things that I experienced, growing up for part of my life in China. And then I realized, [cryptocurrency] is the only thing that can actually successfully combat surveillance capitalism. I just realized that I can change the world at a far faster pace if I jumped into tech instead of the arts, so pivoted over. And then I started, started the very first crypto YouTube channel in Korea in March of 2017.

On how his YouTube channel morphed into Nonce…

All we did was read white papers and share them with people. And one after the other, people started coming in. And so it was a one-bedroom apartment with four people, then a three-bedroom apartment with 25 people, and then it just kept growing and growing. So we had an accelerated learning pace because everybody who was in there was interested in crypto and was interested in studying and sharing with people. That kind of morphed itself into Nonce.

On what most appeals to him about the space today…

What excites me the most about web3, right now is we're still in the infrastructure stages. I'm excited that it's a bear market; that there's a lot of innovation that's coming out; that we actually got a chance to slow down and to learn about a lot of stuff and just question a lot of our assumptions that we might have had.

I'm excited that a lot of the noise has died regarding the madness of the markets. I see a lot of people nowadays who might have [gotten their intro] to web3 from a very surface level, through NFTs possibly… they're actually hunkering down and we see some of them staying around. And they're asking really cool questions, and they're helping us evolve as a scene and as an industry.

On how to innovate in DAOs without reinventing the wheel…

I think when we were first starting DAOs we kind of ignored everything that came before and we just started. As a result, I believe we are doing a speed run of how organizations did develop. I love challenging the status quo, but I think the correct thing is respecting the status quo, meaning we don't have to conform to the status quo, but you have to at least know what came before.

On why South Korea was a perfect place for Nonce to thrive…

Korea is hyper-connected, and the country is tiny. About 50% of the population of Korea live in Seoul. So it is, in some ways a bubble. It's almost like why do hacker houses work in Silicon Valley, but not anywhere else? Right? And the answer is, well, because you have a lot of people who are aligned towards that in Silicon Valley. So in a way, yeah, we were very fortunate to have experienced that. And then also Korea is a very comfy place to live. So it helps us to abstract away a lot of infrastructural things that otherwise, in other places in the world it'd be difficult.

On advice for DAO founders…

I think the experience of being a DAO founder is very, very different from the experience of being a DAO contributor or user. Because there's this huge gap, what I tell founders nowadays is, please go be a contributor at other DAOs. That will shape your experience of what it takes as a founder to basically create the experience that you want for your users.

Check out the full episode of The Builder’s Journey with See Eun Ha and be sure to follow for new episodes every Tuesday!

Visit our socials > > > [Discord] - [Github] - [Twitter] - [Website]