Cryptnotized: How One Month At My Internship Converted Me Into A Believer In Everipedia & Blockchain
It has always been a dream of mine to come to Los Angeles. As someone who has always followed the latest trends, there is no better place to be than the city where culture is created and spread worldwide. This past year, I was looking for internships in LA when I came across Everipedia. As I researched them, they publicly positioned themselves as a modern and inclusive version of Wikipedia. When I spoke to one of their executives on the phone, he simply described it as the wiki of up and coming topics in culture. I was intrigued to say the least, but what made Everipedia even more interesting is how they were leveraging blockchain technology on their platform in a way that had never been tried before with the $IQ token. It didn’t take me too much time for me to decide that Everipedia was the place for me to be and I was excited for what awaited in the City of Angels!
During my first week, my supervisor David Liebowitz assigned me to create Everipedia entries for things I already cared about. So I went at it, authoring pages for YouTubers and influencers such as Jeff Wittek, Noel Miller, and Niki and Gabi. It was easy for me because I was genuinely interested in what I was writing about. Something that I barely noticed was at the same time, I was earning cryptocurrency from my editorial efforts. In theory, if I want to I could trade IQ for BTC and then BTC for dollars; a nice bonus for broke students like me that need a little pocket change. After reflecting on my time at Everipedia so far, the biggest question I asked myself is how do more people not know about this?
To be honest, before I started interning at Everipedia, the only time I heard about blockchain and crypto was in passing with friends or seeing it on my newsfeed. I didn’t know too much about it, but I did have a feeling that there was something special going on. One month into my internship and my time at Everipedia and I have become a firm believer in the revolutionary nature of blockchain technology. There are so many projects and developments happening in this space on a daily basis, I get why trying to keep up with it all would make someone’s head spin.
To me personally, Everipedia stands out from the rest due to how much tangible progress they have made in such a short amount of time. They have had a live in their blockchain form almost a year now and are investing in themselves in a number of ways. This is apparent with the launching of Everipedia 2.0, building a decentralized prediction market, and setting up the IQ Fund to further fund projects building on IQ (yes, Sam has talked about this in the Telegram group in the past). In short, IQ gives Everipedia the potential to evolve beyond its original encyclopedic framework by having the token become the backbone of a knowledge network that will empower users and editors alike.
The next dApp that will be released on the IQ network is PredIQt, a decentralized prediction market. For those who are not familiar, a prediction market is a platform where people can bet on real-life events and outcomes. Researching the potential of PredIQt, the most popular centralized prediction market Predictit.com has reported tens of thousands of traders and hundreds of millions of shares being traded. It is obvious that PredIQt is ripe to take off and with the 2020 elections around the corner, there is no better time to launch a prediction market than now.
Also, how could I forget about Everipedia 2.0? The leadership here have called the revamp the most drastic overhaul Everipedia has been through since its inception in 2015. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been editing this version for some time and one thing that I clearly noticed is how clean and intuitive it is. The site is now truly is a more modern version of Wikipedia that it brands itself to be. I guess Paul Graham was right when he said: “There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica” and it is no wonder why Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia who literally coined the name, joined Everipedia because of how they are revolutionizing knowledge curation.
Although it may not be in the media as much as it once was, behind the scenes, development in crypto is more active now than ever. Even Facebook is diving head first into the industry with the announcement of Libra. With everything going on, it is clear to me that Everipedia is unique in carving their own lane in a way that everyone from the technically advanced to the average user, no matter who they are or where they come from, can be a part of. At first, the inclusivity of Everipedia dealt with only content but today, it has expanded to people from all walks of life participating in the blockchain revolution by becoming editors for Everipedia. In my opinion, that is how real adoption happens, when people are using something and they don’t think about whether it’s a blockchain product or not, they are just using it because they want to and it’s cool.
They say that people come to LA to follow their dreams and write their own stories. Well, here I am writing mine, but now, it’s on the blockchain.
*If you want to keep up with the rest of my internship, follow me @mackenziesmitth on Instagram & @SmithMackenzie_ on Twitter
