I read a book in high school in 2011 called ‘Cryptonomicon’, which was, unknowingly, the first step towards changing my life. It was all about cryptocurrency before cryptocurrency was a thing – and I was fascinated by the idea. I became obsessed with two things in my life at this point; drugs and cryptocurrency.
Despite never taking school seriously, I attended a college prep course where we were given an assignment asking us to develop a thesis and defend it. I loved it. My thesis, inspired by Cryptonomicon, was on consensus-based technologies and the abolishment of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. I poised Bitcoin as an alternative to our current financial system.
I aced the assignment and became infatuated with the world of blockchain technologies. It was the only thing that remained consistent throughout the shit heap of a life that I had lived up to that point. I knew that I wanted to do something with this, so, when I finally got clean, I went all-in on crypto and Web 3.0.
As I began to rebuild my life, I took off running with all of the research I had been doing about web 3.0 and cryptocurrency up to that point and got involved in online forums and local meet-ups, and started to make a name for myself.
The research I had been doing and the connections I had made provided me with the opportunity to work for Boring Protocol, a decentralized VPN service that was owned and operated by its users. This was the chance of a lifetime for me and I poured myself into it completely.
The experience I gained working at Boring helped me expand my network and connected me with students studying the Masters in Science program at MIT. Not long after, I was introduced to their professor who invited me to speak and eventually consult at MIT’s Sloan School of Management – one of the top business programs in the world, about the business applications for consensus-based technologies.
This was the defining moment of my life and proved how far I had come. For all of the bad I had done, all of the shit I had been through, all of the death I had experienced, and all of the suffering around me, I had come full circle. I had made something of my life.