Humans of NEAR: Matt Lockyer
An Unexpectedly Technical Upbringing
Matt Lockyer was born in 1984, at a time when the world was evolving at a dizzying speed. It was in his hometown, Victoria (British Columbia), where he first came into contact with the robotic-like machine of the Macintosh, an experience he clearly remembers to this day. Call it a mother’s intuition or clever foresight, but Matt and his sister had been enrolled in the only elementary school that had a computer lab. This event, as it will later turn out, would be a landmark for Matt’s life. Describing the moment he first encountered the then otherworldly technology, Matt said:
“I have this memory of running into this hallway style room and there is just 10 Macs on one side and 10 Macs on the other side with chairs, with lights over head and floppy disks, and it was crazy- running in and seeing all of these glowing computers.”
This newfound fascination continued into adolescence, when Matt’s mom enrolled him in programming camps and even hired an older student to personally tutor him in the up and coming art of programming. Thanks to his mothers interest in visually pleasing design and a parallel intrigue with computer programming, he was exposed at a young age to a social component that wouldn’t be understood in its importance for years to come- thankfully, one that Matt was already knee deep in.
Around the age of eight, he recalls becoming invested in video games, specifically of the Starcraft variety. He realized that not only was the video game world an enjoyable place to be, but it led to online communities and social connections with like-minded peers. By his mid-teens, his Starcraft friends and him had gotten themselves onto the front page of the Quake world for exceptional water design within the game. Matt’s creativity and natural curiosity coupled with his tech savviness held high promise for the future, one that would soon come to fruition.
A Tech Rebel With a Cause
Despite excelling in subjects in school such as math and science, Matt chose the unique route of taking classes in literature and other social sciences throughout high school. The curiosity that preceded his interest in tech obviously applied to the world at large, along with a desire to “get a well rounded education.” Before jumping straight into university life, Matt once again decided to go off the beaten path by taking a gap year in Germany. This is where he finally took his first secondary school Chemistry courses, taught in German, as he figured that was the subject with the least amount of language involved.
The drive for a well rounded experience took him throughout Europe during that year, traveling to London, France, and Italy among others. At this point in his life Matt faced an open and uncertain future: He did not have a strong desire to stay around his hometown, but was still uncertain about his next move. He ultimately decided to enroll in pre-commerce and pre-business studies at the University of Victoria, but quickly realized the kind of teaching wasn’t for him. Matt describes sitting in a 200 person lecture hall and being taught economic concepts relating to big establishment corporations and the tradeoffs in taking advantage of workers for economic profit. He was the kid who didn’t hesitate to question the professor with the simple request of “Shouldn’t you pay them a living wage?”
It was these types of experiences that caused him to stop going to university, an abnormal move for someone so interested in learning, as he put it. Not waiting for the right opportunity to magically appear, Matt began utilizing the skills he had cultivated in the years spent in front of the computer. He dove into the world of programming of Flash and action script. Ironically, he learned far more doing large projects as a freelancer building websites than sitting in any stuffy lecture hall. His rebellious act of leaving school was turning out for the best.
Matt discussed his one regret from this stage of life- not taking the jump to move to London and dive headfirst into the incredibly successful world of computer programming and website design. He admitted, “I kept seeing people online moving to London and making like 500 pounds a day. I thought- I should get on a plane and go. I totally could have figured it out and made it. The reason why is not because of the money, but the learning experience and the personal branding.”
Despite not taking this leap, Matt continued to immerse himself in the emerging computer tech world in other ways, most notably through graphics and attending web design conferences in Toronto. He describes being fascinated by FWA’s (Favorite Website Awards) and delighted in the fact that a side hustle could garner so much opportunity and success. Other than website development, Matt worked 3–4 days a week full time in bars and restaurants. It was the early days of the internet boom, and although from the outside he seemed like a wandering young person who quit university, new frontiers began to appear across the horizon.
Taking the Tech Plunge
While working and plotting his next move, Matt’s roommate told him about Vancouver’s Computer Science department at the University of British Columbia. The opportunity and possibility glistened in front of him like a ripe fruit, just waiting to be picked. He packed up his bags and moved to Vancouver to enroll at UBC, his passion for computer design and programming now having an outlet to be explored. It was the right move- in three years he completed his undergraduate degree and began working as an undergraduate teaching assistant in the lab, earning what was at that time a hefty sum of $15–20 an hour. On top of the invaluable learning experience he acquired, this set him up for success in the world of academics.
After dipping his toes into teaching, Matt went on to do his PhD work and taught on and off at Simon Fraser University for another 5 years. He learned how to do curriculum development, and recalls sitting there with seven other professors planning the whole arch of courses within the department. The emerging technological universe was theirs to craft for the next generation.
During this period, Matt’s research was specifically in User Experience: Testing users and testing their experience interacting with software. As he describes it:
“We would test people’s experience with the different types of graphics that we used. It is an important distinction that we were researching not how to make the apps more cognitively efficient for the user. We weren’t trying to speed people’s journey up to make it fast to complete tasks- we were focusing on the actual experience. Affect. How does a user feel when certain types of motion and animation are used in user-interfaces, video games, background effects, special effects?”
The research was both intriguing and fun for Matt who, despite being deeply involved with technology, has a social science side to him that inspired the well-roundedness and globality of his early years. The experiences that shaped him previously in other cultures and education systems were now coming to be quite useful.
In parallel to his education, Matt had begun to do startups throughout college and had always dreamed of developing an app. In fact, in his late 20s he and a friend created what is essentially Tiny-List today, called Tiny Lever — a simple app for small communities so that they could make money. Matt laughed about how funny those simple ideas seem now, when not only his skillset but also his career and creativity have grown exponentially. Although his side hustles and contract work with programming continued, that was all about to change.
It was January 2017, and over a slice of pizza Matt’s next ticket was written as he was offered a position at a new venture studio in Vancouver. He recalled the sweet deal that was being thrown in his direction — without taking on any startup risks he would be in charge of mentoring a number of different startups across all facets of their development. The fully paid mentorship position would open the door for growth and experience like never before, at the forefront of emerging technologies and new app ideas. Little did Matt know that this would be his gateway into the world of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.
The Big Bang of Blockchain
In a small flashback, Matt takes us back to the Summer of 2009 when he was sitting on the UBC campus with other students, working on their laptops. As Matt describes it, “a kid cruises by and says ‘Have you guys heard of Bitcoin and are you going to mine it on your laptops?” The intrigue took over and that night he went home, looked at the code online with his (as he described it) beefy desktop, graphics card and all of that jazz, and crunched the numbers. He recalls thinking to himself:
“Oh man, if I mined these bitcoins this is going to cost me like 2–3–4 dollars extra in electricity per month and I don’t know if I am going to get them.”
Matt spent a good hour crunching the numbers and even went over to the electricity account to look at how much the kilowatt hours cost. Oh, to live in 2009!
A few years later this incident came into his memory as he began the new mentorship position in Vancouver at the venture studio, where Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies reentered the room. As his colleague explained the concept of Cryptocurrency, Matt’s creativity was once again ignited, and he felt like the youthful kid fascinated with the beginnings of the internet. Matt wanted to go back to that Web that he first saw — a real peer to peer open internet, where dialogue, creativity, and collaboration flourished. It was not long after starting that Matt was putting money into various exchanges while developing a fascination with another crypto known as Ethereum. The Crypto revolution had officially begun.
The Hazy Crazy Days of the Crypto Boom
Despite not having any background in finance, never having bought stock, or never having invested in anything, Matt jumped headfirst into the emerging world of cryptocurrencies. It was the summer of 2017 and the living was easy, in the most chaotic sense. Matt was working with companies interested in launching ICO’s and working alongside other young and fruitful entrepreneurs, as well as techies that had yet to realize the (literally and figuratively) pile of gold they were cultivating.
It was the heydays of early Crypto, as Matt compared these memories to the movie Boiler Room: A time filled with shorts and t-shirts and flip flops. A daily, exciting grind of yelling and screaming and getting clients. There was no structure or plan to the genius madness that was ensuing- only a repetitive cycle of,
“Just get somebody in, make a whitepaper, make a website, sell tokens, and get them listed on exchanges.”
From the summer of 2017 to March 2018, Matt worked his way deeper into the world of crypto, learning as he went. His interest at this time led him into the crypto conference circuit — and more specifically to the very first ETH Global event in Waterloo. Through a series of fortunate events, he got to sit in the front row for the opening ceremonies right next to Joe Lubin from Consensys. Matt recalls how he nudged Joe and said, “You still consider yourself a startup?” referring to Consensys’ 200 global employees. They began chatting and another invaluable connection was made. Later in line for food he ran into Kevin Owacki and asked him his plans for the future. Kevin replied that he was going to convince Joe Lubin to invest in his startup- a new project known as Gitcoin.
During this same period, Matt tells us about learning Solidity on the road. In the late summer of 2017 he decided to take a week long campervan trip up the coast of British Columbia:
“I taught myself ETH smart contracts in Summer of 2017. I had a camper van and took a 1 week trip up the sunshine coast, camping and working out of coffee shops. When I was finished with the internet at the coffee shop I would make sure I had a bunch of stuff to read and local test network stuff. I was able to get local development going and would work at sunset by a lake, learning everything about ETH.”
NFT’s and The Nifty Magicians
Fast forward, and Matt is still submerged in the world of Crypto. After leaving the venture studio, he attended EdCon 2018 in Toronto and began doing contract work with companies building different types of solutions on Ethereum. This contract work continued until April of 2018, when he proposed one of his most brilliant ideas yet: A standard for composable NFTs (now known as the ERC-998 standard). This standard allowed an NFT to also own other NFTs as well as ERC20s inside of itself. The excitement was palpable, and soon Matt built a community around it: the Nifty Magicians, composed of about 400 people on Discord. As Matt describes,
“We held weekly chats about the standard. I passed it off to someone else to keep it going. And while eventually the excitement died down around it, for six to nine months we had this really thriving happening community around NFTs.”
Even then, Matt knew that composable NFTs were going to be a big thing, and continued working on the composable standard with Nick Mudgeon, who currently works on the Diamond Standard on ETH. Matt and Nick focused on the actual reference implementation, code you could actually run and deploy to attach more NFT’s to your NFT. The simple ingenuity did not go unnoticed.
Trent Maconahee from Ocean Protocol introduced him to Thomas Hess, an ex-Sony VP who wanted to work on an NFT collectables project called JAMM. Matt worked on this project for a while but he soon realised that this social app did not fulfill his desire for innovation, as its direction changed multiple times in an unending series of pivots. The dissatisfaction with the state of affairs kept growing, so he decided to take a break.
Existing in a state of limbo and disenchantment concerning Crypto, Matt coincidentally found himself in Korea at the same time that Korea Blockchain Week was getting started. Fate once again stepped in, and he met Nick White at a Korean restaurant. Both foreigners in a restaurant with a menu that neither of them could read, the gravitational pull brought them to having lunch together, long after the locals had cleared out. After an enjoyable chat about new projects and past memories, Matt was offered the chance to join Harmony protocol. Shortly after returning to the States, he began flying down to the Bay Area to work with fellow techies in a house with mountain views: Welcome to Silicon Valley. Matt continued this commute between Vancouver and the Bay Area until March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, and by default his traveling. Unlike many things this year, this turned for the best, as it led Matt to finding a home new home at NEAR.
NEARly There: Finding My People
Matt first heard about NEAR in February of 2020 at ETH Denver from his friend Dustin Goodwin, an event which he emphasized was fantastically put together and executed. Dustin planted the seed of NEAR in his mind, and Matt began looking into the protocol and its intricacies. He describes his first impressions of NEAR:
“I looked at the leadership of the two projects and I looked at the NEAR resources and the deep technical team and I realized they are incredibly smart and are going to be a success.”
What drew him to NEAR was the knowledge of tech and how there was an understanding of the in’s and out’s of the protocol. He recognized space for him to provide a bridge between people and tech and connect humans to the emerging world of Web3. Shortly after this realization, Matt found himself going through the interview process with NEAR, during which time Harmony attempted a counter offer. Excited about NEAR and his work on the protocol, Matt took the offer from NEAR and joined the team.
Matts described his passion for NEAR, saying:
“I felt good about being with NEAR because of the incredibly smart team. As a developer who spent so many years solo, I didn’t have that much experience working within a team and I wanted to join NEAR to work with others and be challenged and learn.”
Possibly the best advice Matt gave for younger, up and coming Crypto entrepreneurs was “In crypto being the smartest person in the room is not always the best thing. You have a lot of responsibility for a lot of tricky and complex problems that haven’t been solved yet.”
Matt is now transitioning to Head of Developer Relations: To recruit, train, and support Developers as they start to build on top of NEAR. He also sits on the Grants Committee at NEAR where he has a say on where money for apps and grants should go. Among other things , Matt is of the opinion that giving out funds in smaller batches with metrics and milestones attached will be more effective in establishing a sustainable relationship with startups and NEAR. The second thing that Matt is pushing for is to frame the grant money for development of open-source software for any app that is built on NEAR. In other words, funding for an eventual public good as opposed to a direct investment in a startup.
Moving forward with the NEAR team, Matt talked about the various focuses of the protocol at the moment, including building more practical example dApp. Altogether, the DevEx team is expanding to grow developer outreach, production and engagement with NEAR at a pivotal time in its development.
A Look At The Journey
Matt went through the phase that everyone goes through in crypto: of total irrational exuberance about where the space is going. He describes “going down the rabbit hole” in 2017 and becoming somewhat more realistic and disenchanted along the way. That cold realism has since become more optimistic and excited since Matt has started working with NEAR. As he puts it,
“We have a five to six year runway to be where ETH is at today. That is a plan and there is a vision to get there. The NEAR team is extremely driven, and they have a clear sense of what they want NEAR to be, and how they are going to get there”
Matt is looking forward to building out NEAR’s developer community, to ultimately launch one of the most accessible and user-friendly versions of what has been coined The Open Web:
“We are trying to create stuff that doesn’t exist in the real world today. These new stable coins — the algorithmic ones — there is no address for those things. They shouldn’t have an address. They live on the Internet. This is a world we are trying to live in. Businesses native to the internet — being able to show up on some gaming forum in 1995 and actually swap value was what a lot of those websites were trying to do back in the day. Because they didn’t have the technology to decentralize themselves. Today we can actually make that a real opportunity — for everyone to participate in.”
Matt obviously has passion and big dreams, not only for his own career and the future of NEAR, but also the entire concept and future potential of Web3. Having observed that although NEAR products can move at the speed of software, the protocol’s development is still tied to the speed of people. As he says, “Give us time — the internet came out in 1995 and 1997, the dot com bubble was 1999 and now the world’s most powerful companies are companies that were started back then.” Matt concludes by talking about the inevitable crypto and online future that confronts everyone: “This is happening whether you like it or not, and you might as well get used to it.” NEAR develops at the forefront of this brave new world.
