[Off-camera]
When did you discover blockchain, and what drew you into this new world?
[Evelyn]
I discovered blockchain not long after I returned to the United States in 2017. And to me, it was immediately obvious that this was an amazing chance to develop these micro-experiments in these self-contained ecosystems to actually go back to the study of economics and test it and see what actually works and how people relate to each other and how you can create these incentive mechanisms that enable change. And I love this idea of this contrarian thought that systems didn’t need to be held and governed by this monolith companies that control our world. And in fact, it can be distributed. And additionally, there was this idea of data ownership and information ownership and participation and blockchain was really a way to distribute that and put the power of technology back into the hands of the people. So, I started in the world of blockchain as an economist, and eventually developed my own consulting company, which got me really involved with dozens of different projects and building systems like the Central Bank, essentially, for this virtual nation. Um, or looking at issues of cyber-attacks and how to distribute rewards that would actually create this self-evolving, self-reliant system—not relying on these existing monolith companies, um. When I entered into the world of blockchain, it was actually the first time that I had to go back to my roots in economics and actually look at those core studies that I had learned years ago. And I found myself working various different start-ups as a consultant, um, running my own business but looking at things like monetary policy, how to measure GDP through data that is collected, and what data to collect. How to predict what people would do in these theoretical worlds as we’re building them ahead of time by using agent-based modelling, and this was affecting so many different types of projects. It was an extremely exciting time because, as I said, there’s so—there’s this opportunity to work in this microcosm with a very specific application. So, you can test a specific type of market, you can test different actors, incentives, and you can look at everything from digital security, hacking, to creating a digital world in and of itself, to even going down to the base layer of technology and look at the scalability of the concept of blockchain itself. This was a very fun time in my life, and it actually drew me to be in love with this new technology and really see the potential that it could have in disrupting the world, creating more efficient systems with parameters that can more easily be changed, by watching what an individual does, aggregating that on a community level and then responding immediately. So, that’s it.