- TLDR;
The introduction is written as a part of Devcon SEA Scholars Program Application. It is in part a translation of the introduction I wrote in July 2022. Some edits are made.
Who is Agwn?
I believe that a good society constitutes of liberal individuals. By liberal, I mean the congruence of what is willed and what is done. Everyone wills something based on their characteristics and live life to realize their will. Not all shall be fulfilled in the beginning, learning new things and confronting the new opportunities bring what they want and is willing into more vivid picture. I believe that passage of finding what they truly will in the life is a part of one’s liberty. It is important for individuals to be provided with the opportunity to pursue the liberty.
Throughout life, however, we often find ourselves in the situation where the rules of the society dictates you to do something you don’t will to. When I was in fifth grade, Korean elementary schools had “Cleaning Period” where students clean up the classroom after school. One day, a question arose in my mind “We are cleaning the classroom together because we all use here. But why am I here cleaning while the teacher is sitting there watching?” I raised the question to my teacher. That day, I was slapped so hard that it made me realize that something’s wrong with the today’s society.
I searched the remedy by running away from the country. However, I realized that the problem really wasn’t about a particular country or a geographic location but the sustainability of the community culture. In other words, the US, where it was supposed to be the asylum, had its own problem. My college education was the only experience that showed me that there can be hopes. I studied liberal arts where we read the original text in which the common knowledge, whether it be Democracy in America or Newtonian center of masses, are explained. Reading these “Great Books” showed how communities, whether it be in the shape of a cult or a country, come and go. Once the society looses people who pursue their liberty to the utmost capacity while maintaining the model for sustainable flow of resources, it crumbles apart sooner or later, no matter how big or significant it may seem at the time.
As I was graduating from the college, my lingering question was to find the way for a sustainable society. In the meantime, I decided to return to Korea, where I had to run away from. For practical reasons, I was enlisted as an Air Force Officer for my mandatory service and for more personal reasons, I wanted to find the solution of the social problems from the place I saw the most dire needs.
Why Crypto?
It was the summer of 2017. I met See Un, a collegue of mine during the college days. He said he started a youtube channel covering Blockchain and is about to rent a house in the middle of Gangnam, Seoul to live with other people. The whole Bitcoin and the early community surrounding it came to me as a wonder. The digital medium of exchange and the ability to issue that currency in the 21st Century was both non-sensical, in terms of social restraints surrounding the issuance of currency, and too sensical, in terms of the technology. After reading the Bitcoin Whitepaper and meeting a few folks at Nonce, the community that eventually was named soon after its inception, I decided join the crew. It was a beautiful beginning of a lengthy journey.
When I was at nonce, I was mostly a gate keeper, greeting people into the entrance. Since we started as a community, not a professional business, we did not have a system of engagement or a formal program for people to congregate and welcome the new comers. For this reason, I was mostly running studies for the newbies to understand the concept or the culture around the whole blockchain and crypto. I soon realized that I learn the most while teaching others because it forces me to digest the words floating in my head and deliver it into terms that others can understand.
For me, cyrpto is an economic layer upon which each community or individual can set their own system of value to restore the soverignty of their worth. The whole chain and infrastructure, type of fungible / non-fungible / meme token, AI / zk and/or other technical implication are important and interesting. However, what is more interesting to me are the real people in action to take the technology into adoption. In order to do so, it requires a decent system of task allocation and incentive distribution that involves participation and governance of the community. Eventually, the trust of the trustless system is possible through the process of engagement where members of the society acknowledge the legitimacy of the individual sovereignty and the collective regime simultaneously.
Why Ludium?
By the time I was discharged from the military in 2019, I wanted to explore further. Beyond the ICO knock outs and financial medium of exchanged, I wanted to see the new movement of community in action. For this reason, I decided to walk on my own by opening a Salon. I must have opened at least 100 different community programs ranging from watching movies to language exchange. It was an attempt to get back to the origin of community, to see from what brings people together in the first place.
In summer of 2021, one of the friend from nonce, who became one of the core members of HanDAO, asked me to open NFT study with some artists. It’s been a very long time since I was immersed in crypto but through the help of enthusiastic members, I had a great time running the program. In fact, two of the members from the study, who were tiktok influencers at the time, got together with Esther from Axie and created a group called Axiesisters, an IRL crypto idol. It was quite a unique “usecase”, for the lack of a better word, that crypto could ever find. Soon the demand grew from individuals and companies like traditional investment companies and government agencies which drew me back into the crypto rabbithole.
I guess what meant the most for me during all this was to see people find their worth through the community of experience. Crypto, more than just a financial vehicle, provided a new opportunity that would not have otherwise been available. It is those remarkable moments that I would like to witness and spread more. That is the reason I started Ludium.
What is Ludium?
Ludium is a Web3 Builder Community focused on providing information, education, and bounty opportunities for builders to transition their career into Web3. All materials on Ludium are open sourced for the public usage. For the past 3 years, Ludium conducted education and bounty programs for Multichain Foundations, Government, Companies and Communities.
Our current programs are centered around Korean developer cultivation. In Korea, language barrier and lack of the opportunity hinders the potential for builders to onboard onto the ecosystem. Ludium provides open sourced articles and hands on mission for developers to test and learn the tech stacks. Even further, we provide opportunities for individuals and project to onboard into multichain ecosystem through contests like ETH Seoul. We believe that builders are the core pillars to the growth of crypto and providing the right opportunity is the only means by which more builders decide to join the industry.
As a part of an effort for global connection, Ludium recently launched a program called “Road to Global Stage”. Road to Global Stage(RTGS) is a builder talent acquisition initiative to bring new developers to the global stage. It includes education, workshops and mini contest from local builder communities to screen talents. In the end, selected teams will participate in Dubai and Bangkok, to bring local teams to the global stage and showcase their talents. RTGS runs on sponsors from various foundations and companies interested in the stack adoption and builder acquisition.
The program is an ambitious, half a year long endeavor for buidler cultivation. Ludium believes that a quality builder cannot be manufactured in a day. It requires consistency and step by step approach that tracks learner engagement through various missions. As a results, it is important to validate and assess the track record of individual builder based on a transparent, quantitative measures so that individual skills can be comprehended and evaluated based on acceptable metrics. Currently, open source module publication is ongoing on github (Dubai / Bangkok) with the help of 20 + individual contributors.
What Lies Ahead?
Eventually, Ludium seeks to become the onchain talent marketplce where builders find information, choose to provide skills and receive payment based on the contribution. According to Electric Capital’s Developer Report 2023, the presence of the new developers fell sharply by 52% due to the lack of incentive alignment. For the crypto industry to grow, we all agree that more talents start paying attention and work in the industry.
However, it is difficult to determine who is doing what and how much to pay them manually. It is difficult to screen the talent, assign tasks, verify the work and pay them accordingly. Ludium is in the mission to make all this easier through MetaID, the identification layer that presents individual identity based on real user verfication, CMS, the skill validation layer that collects and verifies individual builder profile based on onchain credential and offchain AI Agent, and Treasury that process payment based on the conditions met for the right amount of payment.
We believe that open sourced, asynchronous and incentive aligned way of contribution in Web3 can shape the future or work. For the employer, it benefits the company through geography agnostic, time insensitive, and flexible organizational structure. Practically speaking, it reduces office rent, and fixed labor cost while increasing the service uptime. For employee, it benefits the individual to choose as many organizations at the same time to work in a remote setting so that the total wage may increase, depending on the amount of work, choose your own time and place for work, and less career lock-in period.
Closing Remarks
Although I have been in the whole crypto industry for about eight years now, it almost seems that the work is just about to begin. Everything changes so rapidly and sometimes it’s quite overwheliming to see where we all will end up next week. In the midst of it all, however, I believe that crypto is the future of community to come. I believe that the crypto culture and technical advancement is more fit to reconstitute the society with liberal individuals. For this reason, and for this reason alone, I will proceed with the journey. Hope I get to see more interesting folks join the community.
