CVA Podcast: Ashlie Meredith, Mousebelt

Transcript

[Music] hello hello this is your host tras ahmed ready to kick off another bite-sized episode of the crypto valley association podcast special thank you to ceberbank for supporting us during this initiative as they pursue their mission to redefine finance for the new economy now let's discover together the growing trends of this fast-moving space and try to shed some light on the mysteries it contains today we are joined by ashley meredith head of education at mouse belt who are working to improve the blockchain industry through media educational programs engineering services and a full service accelerator program the crypto

value association is also a proud member of the blockchain education alliance founded by mouse belt so without further ado let's dive straight into the world of blockchain education hello ashley how are you doing today great great to be here thank you so much for having me and thanks to the crypto valley association for supporting what i think is super important in the blockchain space uh education wonderful we'll have this whole episode to to talk uh so much more about that but maybe we start things off and you can share with us your first uh blockchain related uh experience yeah hard to avoid as i'm the head of education and that was kind of my entry point into blockchain i had been working

as a philosophy professor for a few years and i had a lot of friends around me who were like you got to get into this bitcoin stuff uh blockchain stuff is happening my good friends and uh ceos of the company mouse bell finally approached me with a role that was we want to launch a university program and we think that with your academic expertise and curriculum development and love for supporting students that even though you don't know anything about blockchain you can dive in and have a really good time doing it and that's exactly what happens and here i am uh almost three and a half years later wow well that's uh that's incredible i'm really really looking forward to kind of

deep diving into some of those uh some of those areas but maybe you tell us a little bit more about uh mouse belt uh to begin with absolutely so mouse belt was born out of a development shop that was building blockchain technology and they teamed up with a investment fund that wanted to really invest in projects i think back like 2017 2018 a lot of projects promising a lot not really delivering raising tons of money and we thought a good way to really invest in these projects would be to actually build them so uh in addition to capital we were investing engineering resources so all of the

companies in our portfolio as a blockchain accelerator uh this combination of the investment fund and engineering shop launched mouse belt blockchain accelerator and uh every company in our portfolio we're very hands-on and we're actively building these projects and also still do a lot of contracted engineering work uh most recently we are building the nervous cardano bridge that was just announced a few weeks ago so that's kind of some of the stuff that we do wow okay interesting and i'm looking forward to speaking more about the accelerator the accelerator program and and a few other uh things that you have going on but maybe you can just give our audience a little bit of insight into why you believe education is is so

important in this space sure um it's kind of just part of my blood i'm a lifelong learner and educator i've been teaching at the university level for 12 plus years now um and i think for me also coming as a philosopher into the space the ideas behind blockchain and how it could transform society are so important and everyone deserves the opportunity to learn about those and reap their benefits so things like financial inclusion financial independence cross-border payments banking the unbanked this kind of really political philosophical

thing behind it i just think people everywhere deserve to learn about it and reap the benefits of it as well as from a really practical standpoint we're not going to see the innovation you know some of this pie in the sky stuff we talk about as far as banking the on bank unless we have people who can actually build this technology and it's very complicated to build blockchain and students are hungry for it students in computer science programs want blockchain classes and uh really it's up to us as an industry to invest in innovation very interesting um and and so maybe you can tell us more about how your cells that mouse belt differentiate the way uh

education happens in the space because we often hear so much about how how education is important and what's what's your twist on education how do you educate yeah so there's kind of the traditional route where you look at institutions like academia and i think with rising costs of tuition and covid and everything kind of being virtual now people are really opening their minds to different ways of learning and that maybe you don't need a college degree to have the career you want and there's a lot of more opportunities for people to have access to education that weren't there before various technologies made it made it easier so you you have the university side of things where it's very institutional and sometimes slow to adapt and it can take

years for an accredited course to get accepted but there are students there who are working really hard to teach each other to teach student-led classes on their campus and so i think investing there we've sponsored classes before ucla's first ever blockchain engineering course for undergraduates we sponsored a few years ago and there's just a real gap in undergraduate courses in hands-on development so that's somewhere that i think people in the industry could really focus their efforts and see real returns uh lots of enrollment students are really uh eager to take those classes and then there's kind of non-traditional ways of learning which is

signing up for mouse belt dot university where you can log in and take development course that our cto put together uh you know it requires a year of programming experience but we also have a blockchain of business course that is really introductory so um finding these free resources that are out there but someone has to build those too so i'm really encouraged to see a lot of the protocols in the space pretty much all of the major ones you know of have grant programs intended to fund coursework in their protocol you know to help developers learn how to build on this protocol uh to invest in media community managers um new startups that are building uh so really encouraged to

see uh other ways that people can learn or or help contribute to the space and even earn grants to do it oh wonderful and and tell us more about some of the benefits of the mouse belts university program i mean you mentioned uh tuition you know in the traditional worlds being rather expensive i mean tell us more about what you offer uh with this university program oh absolutely so we've always offered our educational resources for free we spend a lot of our personal time on advising calls i built a course called blockchain leadership in my university days spent a lot of time building clubs and advising clubs at the student government level so i really like to

talk students through how to start a club on their campus and run their own courses and ask their university for money we also often sponsor meetups we were doing a lot of that in person before covet hit and right in march i believe i was supposed to go to a conference that we had a student-led you know conference that we had sponsored and it was canceled the week of um which really inspired us to to go double down on some of our virtual efforts so we've been a remote first team since our conception and we've always been doing a lot of zoom meetings uh webinars seminars uh and this industry is so global so it's just

really cool to see um you know we'll get we'll get a great guest speaker to come talk to your school maybe sponsor a little bitcoin giveaway and it's super fun you know we'll have anywhere from 10 really passionate students to up to 100 like all coming in to learn about blockchain and uh maybe win some bitcoin so just there's a lot your your your money and your time can really go a long way when um people are so hungry for knowledge and we're really happy to do that wow wonderful and i see that you go that extra mile as well by actually even having an accelerated program right where you can help incubate some of those projects i mean do you want to tell us a little bit more about that yeah absolutely uh so like i said we

kind of had this unique model where we felt like a company's cash could go further if they were investing it in their engineering resources so that was part of our investment throwing our engineering resources at their project actually building them and we've had a lot of success with some of our portfolio companies moving on to follow-up funding series a rounds um you know uh being being bought out you know all those exciting things that you want to see happen for a startup um so it's kind of proved that model um but because we're so hands-on we can't take everybody so but we had a lot of inbound requests to join the accelerator so we

also launched mouse belt startup school um which like some of the university educational resources i've mentioned have all of that on the website have open office hours with us so that even if we don't have the resources right away to to do a full investment we're still able to provide some support to startups in the space wonderful wonderful and you've been doing this for for quite some time and i know we spoke about it just just before about this 10th anniversary event that you're about uh to host i mean 10th wow that's that's that's uh incredible would you like to tell us more or about about this event you're hosting yeah so that around the time when our uh you know this conference we had

sponsored got cancelled and everybody you know unsure what to do all the events are being canceled we built this community around students who are in our telegram groups and uh joining our meetups every week and one of them had the idea to do a virtual conference for their student conference and we've been you know hosting virtual meetups for a while and had launched a podcast called bitcoin radio the year before so we thought why don't we take this community we've built and all of our connections in the space all the interviews we've already done with the podcast and start doing a virtual conference so we've been doing that almost every month for the last year so

it's been over a year but we're just at the 10th event so every every month or so we do this uh virtual conference series it's called reimagine 2020 now reimagine 2021 and our naming convention was you know let's kind of reimagine what's possible the whole world has been kind of been put on pause but maybe it's also an opportunity for us to pause and reflect and rethink how we work how we live um and just get together and have really good conversations and so by the time this episode comes out it should be about time uh or maybe it'll be just after but you can always catch the uh episodes on youtube

uh but august 15th will be our 10th anniversary event wow incredible so everyone make sure to uh tune in uh the reimagine events are very very very interesting i even posted participated in one uh myself i think actually was burned the banks or something along this line are very some very great uh great speakers and really really insightful uh one there and maybe actually you can tell us a little bit more about so since since you're so uh distributed in terms of you're doing virtual events and really anyone can participate i mean uh do you see uh any like people from all over the globe participate i know that you're based uh

in in in the us yourself i mean how is the participation on the global spectrum yeah do you mean for the conference or just mouse belt in general uh yeah i would say mouseville in in general um yeah i would say of course just because we're english native english speakers it's gener and and geography a lot of us are based in the us i would say there's a lot kind of concentrated in the us canada um but we see a lot of schools from emerging markets uh latin america uh we just did a virtual event for mouse belt university in tanzania that had 70 attendees and so really it is all over the place you

know unfortunately we're a pretty small distributed team and and we don't have everyone in our team who can speak every language but we want to like get into every country um we're always open to make things work um we have an initiative going in thailand right now we have an office there so um we kind of launched this thai university initiative where we would focus on the schools in thailand and try to see if we could get all of these universities talking to each other more and collaborating together and we discovered that there's actually a lot of professors who are really interested in blockchain who are teaching blockchain classes and we we've had great attendance at our

virtual events with them incredible well that's that's true incredible and i mean what are your thoughts on on the way education is going to uh grow within this space i mean uh uh bitcoin has been now around for for over uh 10 years we're seeing uh slow mature adoption with everything that's happened now uh within uh 2021 what do you believe is is the future of the the education uh space within within the blockchain industry yeah i'll just say that in my three and a half years kind of watching the space and engaging with people like the crypto valley association and other members of

our blockchain education alliance which we launched october 2019 you know we had a lot of contacts in the space who we've done development work for and we've been running this university program for over a year and we approached a bunch of these protocols and even some enterprise companies uh pg e just joined uh last month couple months ago we announced that is that we think this is important the innovation you want to see in the space isn't going to happen until there's kind of a you know mass not even mass adoption but like a mass amount of developers who are able to build it so let's invest in education and in the last few years i've seen you know a lot of protocols starting to

offer grants for educational programming sponsoring more student events really wanting to engage universities and source talent and find interns so i think that we'll see a lot more companies investing in education and especially if they want people developing on their protocols creating higher quality content for their tutorials and things like that and then at the university level of course like it's kind of slower but you see from students starting their own club and teaching themselves to maybe there's a course in the certificate program to for example portland state has an online business blockchain certificate that you

can get even if you're not a student they're starting to offer degrees and masters in in blockchain and cryptocurrency so i think you'll just see more and more opportunity for formal education informal education and and just a lot more interest from students demanding it as well um incredible yeah more and more and more opportunities with this uh distributed technology that's that's wonderful to hear and uh actually i wanted to ask since did you come from such a uh let's say the traditional educational space what was your aha moment when entering the the blockchain world where you really saw and then said wow okay this this this space is is really

at the forefront and it can really really change the world for maybe some of the listeners that have yet to have this this yeah uh aha moment yeah so early on to kind of do a deep dive in to this new industry i was jumping in i read the truth machine the blockchain and the future of everything by uh paul vigna and he has a co-author that i can't recall at the moment but they basically say like getting this technology right is going to take people from all sectors of society you know psychologists communicators um me coming from such a soft soft humanities background not being technical kind of felt scared off but they said that in order to say take

this as a clarion call to get involved that this this technology is so important and it's going to take all kinds to build it so you should get involved in some way so that encouraged me um and then just seeing how how passionate and how diverse the students were that i was working with um we had i mean it's what you would expect 60 computer scientists or engineers but there's a environmental scientists philosophers lawyers all marketing people you know all getting inves interested in this space so really said you know something's going on here and it attracts so many different kinds of people that just really encouraged me to keep going and then ultimately the kind

of philosophical aspects of it of how it could reorder society and the benefits and financial inclusion and the ethics of it i guess i am an ephesus really really uh excited me wow that's uh that's beautiful thank you thank you so much ashley and and thank you for for joining us today i i was wondering do you have any final words uh for our listeners uh today how they can get further involved potentially with mouse belts or maybe yeah and any final thoughts yeah no thank you thank you so much for having me um anyone who is interested in more resources for developing blockchain we also have some open source tools that you can use if you're just getting

started mousebelt.com should should lead you to all of our different areas but mousebuild.university for for the students out there startup school for the startups out there and hopefully everybody can tune in to our 10th anniversary of reimagine 2021 and if they miss it head over to our youtube and check out shiraz on there as well wonderful not to not be missed uh it's gonna be it's gonna be wonderful so thank thanks thanks again uh actually for joining us and to everyone listening if you enjoyed this conversation feel free to check out more on our website cryptovalley.swiss where we host plenty of events educational material and even provide information on how you can join

our growing community so thanks again ashley for for joining us my pleasure thank you so much great stay tuned stay safe and until next time from the crypto valley in switzerland bye [Music]