Dystopia Labs: Roadmap Sketch 2020 – Dystopia Labs

Our story starts with a very simple problem that most people in the blockchain space (unfortunately) still suffer from — noise & information overload.

Even in a down market, there’s just so much technical innovation and development happening every day that it’s hard to stay up to date (and understand things at a deep level), unless you’re willing to bury your head in documentation, whitepapers, and research 24/7. For most people, that’s an impossible ask — thus, knowledge gaps are extremely widespread and even good actors (who want to do the right thing) would accidentally make stupid decisions & create shitcoins.

To solve this problem, our founder (Hsin-Ju Chuang; ex-Head of Growth at Stellar / Lightyear (InterStellar), Solana, and a Director at Tezos; mentor at 500 Startups) started a fun side hustle, jokingly named Dystopia Labs, to stay up to date on all the innovations happening in the space. The formula for the side hustle was simple:

• find an interesting technical topic
• use her network to capture the best speakers
• run an event around it
• get the speakers to teach about that topic to a crowd (so that everyone could save time & NOT have to read hundreds of pages of documentation)

Even though it was just a side hustle, in 2019, we educated over 1248 people, ran events in 2 different countries, and hosted a number of notable speakers like:

• Roger Dingledine (the co-founder of Tor / onion router)
• Zooko Wilcox (the co-founder of Zcash)
• Austin Griffith (the founder of Burner Wallet, ex-Gitcoin)
• along with many other technical experts from 0x, Harbor, Dharma, dydx, ConsenSys, and more. You can watch the video recordings here.

On Nov 2019, we shifted from side hustle to full-time work, have incorporated as a C-Corp, and are hustling to scale up operations. We decided to stick with the name Dystopia Labs because it’s memorable and is aligned with our mission which is to:

1. help combat knowledge gaps in the space
2. get new blood into the space
3. inspire students & devs to build viable blockchain businesses (or earn some side hustle money).

We believe that if we’re able to push these three points, we’ll be able to do our part to make sure the blockchain space will NOT become very dystopian in the future.

Dystopia Labs will be kicking off 2020 with 4 virtual edu summits with IRL viewing parties (100% free for students) so that we can bootstrap our startup (we will not be taking any VC $$$; our business model is corporate sponsorships). After that, we will introduce a hiring platform to help educate students on blockchain tech & then place them (via jobs & internships) at top tier blockchain companies. Beyond that, we have a few interesting projects still in the works that we’ll be releasing in Q3 and Q4. Our goal for 2020 is to basically help scale blockchain education so that there will be more mainstream adoption.

These are our first 2 conferences:

TLDR; Dystopia Labs exists to prevent a dystopian future for the blockchain space. We identify knowledge gaps in the blockchain space, share case studies & operational tactics so that devs can build viable decentralized businesses, and are hyper-focused on bringing more students & devs into the blockchain space. Our first priority is to work on interesting things; earning money is always secondary.

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