Let’s Build.
Want to hear an origin story?
My name is Jeremy, but everybody calls me JG…I’m a small business owner in America’s southwest, providing delivery services for e-commerce retailers; a sector commonly referred to as “Last-Mile Delivery”.
About a month after bitcoin’s all-time-high in December 2017, I overheard one of my delivery drivers telling another, about profits he made by investing in something called Tron…& such is the legend of my entry into the cryptoverse.
I suppose I’m relatively new to the blockchain space, but I showed up just in time to be attacked by the polar bears of Crypto-winter, so… I’m definitely an expert now. Prior to this, I had been aware of bitcoin, but knew nothing of Ethereum or alt-coins. None of it fit into my world, & I had no real desire to learn.
But upon hearing of such profit potential from that employee, curiosity hit level 1000. And so I hurled myself down the rabbit hole like an Olympic diver, scouring the web for all things blockchain…for weeks. I became enamored by the potential of Smart Contracts, and the doors of innovation they could open. I was consumed by the sovereignty & freedom of ownership found in a store of value like bitcoin…and all I could think about was the evolution of tokenization, and what the world could look like in the very near future.
$alt
In just a few days I concluded that Tron was not something I was willing to hold longterm, and Ethereum was still smoldering in crypto-kitty smoke. And although I was new to town, it was obvious for me that:
A) its still very early.
B) real value lies in real use.
Obviously, scalability is foundational for success, so I went searching for Layer 1 protocols that could maybe one day work in real life. The goal then was to buy enough tokens to afford a seat on the rocket-ship…making 100x trips to the moon and all that jazz.
I first stumbled across Zilliqa during a Binance listing contest, just a few short weeks after my deep-dive began. And it was immediately at front & center of my radar. Having read through (what I could understand of) the white paper, I was thoroughly intrigued. I found the telegram chat and there, I found community.
Hope & promise filled the air. Sophisticated, yet digestible dialogue was archived for me there everyday; it was like a knowledge-buffet. Community members engaged with founders & core team members in ways that benefitted me greatly. Optimism was the common denominator, and admins had super patience powers; none of which had been my experience in other chats at the time. I was all in.
Then immediately alts were siezed by The Frost! That 2018 bear mauled all of crypto like a rag doll. And even now, bitcoin seems to be gathering all the world’s satoshis unto itself, like a black hole… or a sat-hole. But those conditions lead me to take a good step back, & get an objective look at this space, my portfolio, and the tech.
Here for the tech, right?
The ideas of profit and ownership are what originally drew me here, but it truly is the evolution of technology & the clear potential that kept me. Even though $ZIL the coin didn’t offer me many gains, #Zilliqa the foundation, its team, & my friends in the community, were integral in my growth in this space. Watching a research paper develop from idea to MainNet, and seeing milestone after milestone met, was a real bonding agent for that community, myself included.
Knowing I had purchased utility tokens that still weren’t really being utilized, I decided to just be patient & carry on, following developments as they came. But instead I found myself getting long-winded in the chat groups, trying to stitch up bear wounds & track trolls, leading me to become a community mod.
But, its really hard for me to sit still in life once triggered, so I started thinking more about how I could contribute, or what i could actually do, to make blockchain migrate into my world, aside from just getting rekt on exchanges.
I knew of Zilliqa’s ecosystem grant, & that it had an “innovation track”, to spur creativity, but even with a great idea, I’m not a programmer, or a fin-tech guru. I can’t make a dApp, so why try? I’m not from the world of high academia or cyber security, and there’s no pedigrees or letters next to my name. So while I’ve been blessed to find some success in delivery, I’m just super regular in this fanciful world of blockchain.
Nevertheless, in May of 2019 I had a very common package-tracking issue come up at work (happens daily) but this time was different! The proverbial light bulb illuminated in my mind in an instant. Vision. So I sat down and started just brain-dumping & diagramming. I went a week straight spewing into my various text editors, either hunched over a keyboard or destroying white board markers.
Although I’m no engineer, that no longer mattered; I had the vision. There was zero doubt in my mind that I would build and succeed, if I found a capable cofounder to join me and take charge with the tech. So I put the word out to my inner circle, that I needed an experienced software engineer, and within a single sun-moon cycle, I met a local developer named Gabe.
Gabe & I learned that we had dozens of mutual friends & just hadn’t actually met one another until then. We grabbed lunch at Monroe’s (now a tradition) in downtown Phoenix, & discovered that our circles seemed bound to converge sooner or later. We quickly developed a blueprint, & have been laser-focused in unison since that day.
The initial plan was to solve a few problems in my existing delivery business, and add some transactions to the Zilliqa ledger. But at every turn, the scope of applicability widened, and now we believe we can potentially disrupt the entire Shopper-Shipper dynamic at the point of delivery. Last-mile delivery is an explosive market, and our platform is designed to intersect in multiple verticals, facilitating tons of value….I mean tons.
Great innovation breeds further innovation. PackagePortal exists because Zilliqa succeeded in building the world’s first public blockchain based on sharding, and reached out to the community to build upon its platform.
Our US based company was founded in Wyoming in 2019, and seeks to drive longterm value to online shoppers and shippers globally, by decentralizing delivery data, cutting costs on confirmations & reviews, and by digitizing loyalty programs with the power of blockchain.
