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Introducing Aptos, an EasyA Consensus Hackathon Gold Sponsor
Recorded: April 29, 2025 Duration: 0:51:48Space Recording
Short Summary
Aptos is gearing up for the EZA Consensus Hackathon in 2025, announcing significant partnerships, funding opportunities, and a focus on innovative projects that leverage DeFi and AI. With a $200 million ecosystem fund and travel scholarships for participants, Aptos is committed to fostering growth and supporting the next generation of blockchain developers.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello everyone.
Hello everyone.
A brief intro on how excited we are for Consensus 2025 in Toronto and the EZA Consensus Hackathon
of 2025.
Everybody is just joining right now. I can see Anuja has just joined as well. And David
Walensky will be joining us shortly as well. But yeah, to recap, we are super, super excited to have
Aptos join us as a partner for the EZA Consensus Hackathon in 2025. Over the course of the next 30 or so minutes on this space we are going to cover exactly what
you can expect from aptos why you should build on aptos an overview of the prizes which are going
to be out there the travel scholarships which we have hitherto not actually uh even talked about
yet uh in the official channels yet and then what happens after the
hackathon as well so so much to cover so excited for it too and we'll give it a couple of minutes
for everybody to be able to join and then we'll be able to kick things off so I know over the past
couple of days over the past couple of weeks everybody's been preparing for consensus 2025
um and just for everybody who's just joined as well this space will be recorded so that you can
listen to it afterwards as well so anybody who is listening to the recording welcome as well
consensus i can't believe it's literally just around the corner.
It's literally just over about two weeks away. So there is so much to talk about and so much excitement going on around today as well. So again, quick recap of the agenda for everybody
to join. We are joined today by our very, very special co-host of this space and speakers,
Anuja, who we've had the pleasure of working with over the past couple of years,
and also David Wolinski.
And anybody who is at Consensus Hong Kong will know that David led one of the keynotes with his story.
I was very, very impressed by his presentation because he is a master of understanding exactly
why we are here in web3 and exactly why we are here and solving these problems i remember
david your presentation and your talk talked about how your frustrations with the whole cross-chain
experience and everything in between there and i found that that was just so relatable for
developers. So I'm really, really thrilled to have you, David, and also you, Anujia,
here today on this space. So kick things off. Now that everybody has started to fill in and join,
and we have Anujia and David here as speakers. For anybody who doesn't know me, I am Phil,
the co-founder of EZA, Duolingo for Blockchain, biggest web free education app. And we are absolutely thrilled to be welcoming Aptos as a gold sponsor of the
EZA Consensus Hackathon in Toronto, which is set to be North America's biggest ever blockchain
hackathon. But why don't I take a moment now to allow David to introduce and also Anuja to introduce themselves.
We'll kick it off in alphabetical order with Anuja and then we'll come to David.
And Anuja, thank you very much for joining.
I know that you just landed in Dubai for Token.
So I don't know what the time is out there.
It's probably a little bit late and you're probably super jet lagged as well.
But thank you so much for joining.
Of course.
Thank you, Phil and team, for having me. Super excited to be here.
Hi, everyone. I'm Anuha. I'm an ecosystem growth lead at Aptos Foundation.
Super, super excited to be attending Consensus Toronto.
A bit about myself. I guess I'll tell a little bit of the story.
I mean, I'm excited to hear David's story, but my story for why Web3 is I've always been drawn to technologies that unlock access.
Growing up, I was obsessed with financial literacy, and it felt like one of the most
important life skills that no one was teaching me in school.
And that curiosity actually led me to hackathons.
So I am obsessed with hackathons in the sense that I've been to 156 total hackathons.
Duh, Phil and Dom very
well know this. And it really led me into my builder era, which eventually landed me on a
founding team focused on like fintech startup, on product strategy that focused on cross-border
payments, which led me naturally click to Web3. And Web3 felt like that natural extension of that
mission and not just improving the outdated
systems, but reimagining them from ground up. And truly, that's what I get to do at Aptos,
is onboard the next generation of builders, which is what I am so excited to see at ConsenSys as we
bring on that next gen of builders and make sure that they get the right tooling and building blocks to
be able to leverage um so yeah that's kind of my overall story of how i got started in web3
um but yeah over to you david absolutely then love that story as well and for anybody who
is coming and listening is coming to consensus toronto uh anu here will be there and anu here
is one of the best people to connect with has so much energy really brings the life to the hackathon and will be your an amazing shepherd for you if you join the ecosystem
whether you are just joining web3 for the first time or just joining the Aptos ecosystem for the
first time as well thank you Phil David I love your story um you know obviously you have a wealth
of experience and have come into it as well from Web2.
A lot of people who are coming to Consensus Toronto
have started in Web2 and just exploring Web3 for the first time.
So we'd love to hear how you first got in as well
and what you're up to now at Aptos.
I mean, it's going to be difficult to follow after Nuiya.
That was a really great story, Nuyah.
We're just getting to know each other because you just joined Aftos recently,
so I'm looking forward to hearing more about your story.
But for me, it's been a bit of a different journey.
I came in more on the tech side.
I was in academia for a long time.
I took a break from that, explored Facebook's ads network for a while.
Fortunately, I got lucky that Facebook decided to
go down the path of figuring out Web3. They figured it didn't work out very well for them.
But what doesn't work out for one worked out for us. And we were lucky that Avery and Mo took
Aptos out of Facebook. We founded Aptos in 2022. And the real touching thing for me being in this
space is, much like Anuya,
is like being able to connect with people. Like there's kind of like several different routes
that you can take. You can go deeper, deeper into the tech and, you know, focus on that,
or you can figure out how to make the tech work really well with people. And so I've kind of
veered more towards that direction. It's just been really great being in this space. You know,
going back to when we first launched Aptos, the engineering team was kind of at the forefront of figuring out
how to interact with communities, ecosystem builders.
And we've kind of maintained that a little bit over time,
but it's really great to have folks like Anuya come to the organization
and take on a lot of that opportunity and responsibility
so that we can collaborate and really, you know,
bring developers en masse to Aptos
and see a lot of the great success that we're starting to see.
And, you know, great collaboration with you folks over at EZA. I really loved what we did over in
Hong Kong and I'm super stoked for what we're going to be doing over in Toronto.
Absolutely. And I'm thrilled, absolutely thrilled to have you both on this space as well, so that
we can share a little taste of what is coming up in Toronto as well. We're now going to come to talking a little bit about,
of course, first of all, what Aptos actually is and stands for.
And then we'll come on to the tracks,
followed by what Aptos is looking for from participants,
and then also touching on the travel scholarships.
So I think first thing to chat about
is just in terms of Aptos and why developers should look to build on Aptos.
This can be from either one of you, David, or Anu here.
What do you think developers should be looking for when they're choosing between the different tracks?
Obviously, if they've come to Hong Kong for consensus, they probably already know a little bit.
But for anybody who's just coming at it for the first time, I think we have a lot of developers who are coming in from a web 2 background and so maybe they're familiar with
the story of how it spun out of meta or facebook at the time um but yeah what do you think they
should be looking at in terms of after why should they be looking at aptos compared to maybe some
of the other tracks out there i can uh definitely let david take this, and then I'm happy to kind of add in here.
I see. After I said all that I said, now you want to be more cautious there.
You know, it's a good question. You know, we recently had a really clear direction that we're taking at Aptos around this global trading engine.
In Hong Kong, we focused on the intersection of DeFi and AI.
And I think that resulted in a lot of great opportunities, kickstarting some efforts.
We also saw MetaMove Hackathon.
We also saw Metamove Hackathon.
We're continuing to see that energy.
And, you know, I really want to see more projects
to try to think about how you take advantage of,
whether it be the existing protocols that are on Aptos
and do more with them,
take advantage of some of the core technologies
that we're bringing out.
You know, we've got the upcoming concepts
that'll enable you to bring your existing wallet
from other blockchains
and seamlessly start doing things in Nantos.
We're building out a core order book that helps with optimizing operations and just,
you know, eliminates a lot of the overhead of just building some of your core DeFi applications.
And then we've got a plethora of applications, DeFi protocols already out there.
And I think there's a lot of opportunity to kind of explore that space and say, what can I do that would tie this together? And, you know, just to say what I
would personally like to see is, you know, I'd love to see more yield. I'd love to figure out how
I get into Aptos and I optimize my yield strategies. And I can do that in a way that
doesn't require me to spend eons studying and dealing with the risk management, all that kind of craziness.
But there's also another vertical in the payment space that we're also pretty excited about.
You know, we've got the three major stables, USDC, USDT, and USDE. They're easy to use on Aptos.
And I think there's a lot of killer products that we could probably imagine coming to that space.
And, you know, ultimately, and I'll pass it over to Anuya in a second, is, you know, we've got,
we're going to have great DevRel on site to help brainstorm with you. We've got great
growth folks like Anuya who are going to be there as well. And, you know, regardless of which path
you go down, you know, I'm excited to engage deeply and just think about what would be the
best given, what the hackathon or participant skill set is and how that aligns with what we're trying to do at Aptos.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and to add on to what David just said, right, and going back to the
stable coins and payment side, something I'm really excited for Aptos for sure is the fact
that stable coins are lightning fast on Aptos and being able to unlock that and seeing what hackers could potentially do with that really excites me.
As well as keyless sign-ins, ZKProofs, gasless transactions, cross-chain accounts, on-chain randomness.
There's just so much that's happening in Aptos that I think builders can really tinker with.
And those blocks are available to them to play around with. And on
top of it, to David's point, having the DevRel team, I mean, we're going to show up ready to
mentor the hackers on the ground, right? We want to make sure that we're building alongside them.
Maybe David will start hacking along too. Who knows? He'll think of some awesome idea
while we're out there. We just start hacking. We really want to create that hacker environment. In
fact, we're actually having a hacker house in downtown Toronto. We're calling it the Sky House.
It's going to be a penthouse downtown where hackers can hang out, especially after the venue
closes, to really create that old school hacker culture that sometimes I feel like we're slightly
steering a little bit away from. I know Dom and Phil, your guys are bringing that back.
So I'd love to see it.
So I want to really amplify that further.
But yeah, I mean, honestly, I just think there's just so many opportunities for builders to
play around with.
And Aptos truly is a greenfield of opportunity for them to get started with.
And on top of that, I'm excited that Aptos is a move chain.
And coming from a Rust ecosystem previously, I truly believe that move actually does have a bit of a lower barrier of onboarding entry, which I'm excited to myself.
As David had mentioned, I'm fairly new to the ecosystem.
So I myself might be building as well, just kind of playing around with Aptos and trying to see what I can do and cook up.
Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Well, money moves better with move, right?
Yes. There we go. Thanks.
Yeah. No, I mean, it's fascinating to hear both of how you actually came into Web3.
I think from what I gathered as well from hearing David's talk in Hong Kong. David loves his yield. So if you want
to impress David, do something yield based. Now, of course, that brings us perfectly onto the tracks.
So we have a very, very exciting set of tracks that you shared with us earlier. And I think now
is the perfect opportunity to explain a little bit more about what is coming
up in terms of the tracks um money untrained building the future of global finance on aptos
i've heard a lot and i think people who are listening to the space have been following aptos
have seen aptos as the money chain and have seen that being bandied around but would love to hear
uh straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak,
you know, what you what you want to see on those tracks and also just what that track really, really means.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the core of it, the challenge here is that money unchained, right? Bringing the global financial economy on chain. I think our tagline has been the global economy never sleeps and the current
financial systems do. So they're slow, they're expensive, they leave too many people out,
and it's time to do something better. And we were in that phase of our lifetime to kind of make that
happen. We're seeing that already happen. So what that looks like could be many different things that people can
build. It could be a small piece or a full stack of things. So focusing on payments and financial
access is something that could be really key here. So moving money faster, cheaper, more globally,
the cross-border payments, using those high performance tools and fast stablecoin transactions to see what builders can do with that.
Merchant tools as well, like POS systems, things of that nature.
And then AI and finance, right?
The intersection, there's no better time than to think about how can we automate certain
things in our life using AI to automate, to make financial systems smarter, right? Making
smart yield generating tools potentially, or I don't know, a financial advisor that
is an AI generated portfolio manager of some sort could be fun one to play around with,
or just wallet agents could also be something if we don't want to go that far and big. And then obviously like the DeFi space where the DeFi infrastructure,
where we really can create and extend on the existing rails that we have. I think one of
the key things that we see with Aptos that for my audit of 30 days of the Aptos ecosystem is
Aptos has really owned the DeFi space for
about, for quite some time now. We've been live on mainnet for a little less than two years. David,
correct me if I'm wrong here with the timing. I think 2022 is when we went live on mainnet and
in just that timeframe, $1.5 billion in TVL and quite the, like the DeFi space has been owned.
And I want to see what more we could do here
with cross-chain identity, things like that,
using Aptos' native features.
But yeah, I said a lot there.
Basically, we want to see how value can move.
And this is an open track, in my opinion,
wanting to bounce ideas and just play around with Aptos stack.
This is probably where we want to build.
So yeah, David, anything else to add to that? I know I said so much. If you wanted to give more
detailed, directed tracks that you're excited about, I would love to hear that, especially.
I think I answered the wrong questions in the wrong order. So it goes back to,
as our friends at EZA know, I care a lot about yield and making that easy for users.
What I learned in the presentation is you're willing to risk losing a lot of money
in order to get to that yield, right?
When you were swapping that money across your chair.
I think you were swapping it from Avalanche to Apto
to take advantage of some opportunities.
You almost lost it all, right?
I mean, let's not go into the details now.
That's trade secrets.
You have to be on site to get that real anti-alpha, if you will.
But yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunities
and developer experience, user experience is particularly
a huge area that I think will come through strong.
You go to any panel today that talks about
what is the biggest gap in Web3
and you're consistently hearing narratives around
it's way too darn hard for people to get into it
at the beginning.
All these tracks are really can tie into advanced users,
but what can we do to actually get
as many advanced users as possible?
And I think the answer to that question ought to be
a lot of hackers hackathon submissions and to drill into that a little bit david i mean yield is so exciting and
ultimately i think that what we've seen over the past couple of years you know dom and i have been
in web3 for what feels like uh an era now um and we've seen so many different yield opportunities
come we've seen them go i think that users when comes to yield, they're now wise to the fact that
yields can't just be generated magically out of thin air, right?
It's like, where does the yield come from?
And so when we look at hackathons, I think sometimes we've seen
hackathon projects be like, oh, you know, we'll just launch a token and
that'll be the way the yield is coming from.
Right.
And I'm like, Hmm. Uh, yeah, maybe, you know, flashback a couple a token and that'll be where the yield is coming from, right? And I'm like, hmm, yeah, maybe, you know,
flashback a couple of years,
people will be happy with that.
But what we found is that, you know,
it's not necessarily just magic money, right?
And the yield ultimately needs to come from somewhere,
whether that is, you know, a token that users are buying
and then ultimately, you know,
we have these unsustainable tokenomics.
But ultimately, I think that the market is maturing, developers are maturing,
and users are maturing too. And they're like, okay, well, you know, we need to look for
where the yield actually comes from. And we're seeing, you know, with stable coin yields,
where that is coming from, whether it's backed by, you know, T-bills, as in the case of Tether,
or maybe USDC, obviously, they don't return them back to the users, but we now have yield-bearing stable coins,
which are returning those yields back to the end user.
Where do you see, for example, this going?
Obviously, maybe you're a yield maxi, so to speak.
Where do you think that developers should be looking for
when it comes to yield?
Where do you think they should be drawing these yields from
if you have maybe a couple of good examples or ideas?
I think this is a great question for folks
that might not necessarily be on the call,
but I can talk a little bit about,
we've got this really cool program called LFM on Aptos
that's really looking to help founders go from, you know, building and get into the space
of figuring out what solutions they want to solve and then figuring out what it means to,
you know, work effectively in your tokenomics space, go to market and really engage with your
users. I think one of the most fundamental things that you have to get right in that space is,
as you, you know you keenly pointed out,
it can't just be generating wealth out of thin air that doesn't work. It's got to be fundamentally
figuring out what problem are you solving? How are you delivering key values and using ideally
your tokens to support that type of utility type of framework so that it is strongly backed by, like, there is meaningful value being generated here.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, 100% agree.
So I think, yeah, I would definitely encourage builders
who are thinking about generating
those sorts of yield generation opportunities
to think about where does it come from?
You know, have a look at maybe some of those
other stablecoin projects,
have a look at some of the DeFi ecosystem
that's already out there on Aptosos um you know which takes us onto then you know some of the challenge
statement areas and you know new here i'd love to uh turn this back to you now there's a couple
of ideas that you put together in the challenge statements um i absolutely love them so we've got
payments we've got merchants and developer tools ai and and finance, and we've got DeFi.
When we were talking before, we were talking about how we can potentially even bring Wall Street on chain. With Aptos, that's actually potentially possible. What do you think in
terms of examples of projects that maybe you'd be excited to see built that maybe fall into
one or even multiple of those categories.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I really think that I think, yeah, we really did joke about bringing Wall Street on chain, right?
The global trading engine, as Aptos likes to refer to it.
I think that there is a world where we could, I mean, in a world that doesn't exist yet,
but we can bring together global trading across borders and put that on chain.
Right. I mean, whoever solves that right there is probably a prime example of a project that I'm really excited about that I could definitely see happening not too far from now.
Yeah.
Fantastic. And that actually is a perfect segue onto what you're looking for from hackathon participants.
So at a hackathon, there is a short period of time.
For this hackathon, it is three days.
So it's running right alongside the main consensus conference.
And then, of course, people can then go to your awesome hacker house afterwards as well
and continue hacking throughout the evening and night.
What do you think would be the ultimate best outcome
that you would be looking for from developers at the end?
So they come on 14, by the end of 16, they've got X.
What would that be?
What would that X factor be for you from developers?
I mean, the X factor really is,
I just want to see,
I don't think that every developer,
there's five prizes, right?
So every developer isn't winning,
but the X factor really comes
from them just being willing to play, right?
Like it's a hackathon, have fun with it.
And being willing to see
whether they can solve this idea that they might have come
in with from my understanding dom and phil we were talking about how many of these builders are
probably coming in with a lot of web 2 background right one of the key things that i really think
that we haven't solved in the web 3 space is uh product market fit or the ease of product usage
right i mean i was listening to to David speak on a panel earlier today
where he was referring to how the UX of things isn't as seamless, right?
We often see a lot of different, like if I'm trying to get my dad to use crypto,
he's just like, I'm good.
It's fine.
I'll keep using my MasterCard payment system.
But that seamlessness hasn't come across.
So I'd be curious to see
how the Web2 folks can think through, hey, like, this is how I do it in my day-to-day life. Now
we have this really cool tech. How can we make this so seamless that the mass audience could
use, right? That is something I really want people to think through as an X factor potentially here and be able to look
at their day-to-day lives and solve for those challenges as well.
So yeah.
Totally agree.
Yeah.
I think UX is like the major, major bit that needs to improve.
So in terms of what you're looking for, in terms of what makes a winning project, UX
will be a big part potentially also to make David happy,
throw in some yield. Any other pieces that you would want to see developers really, really focus
on? Yeah. Well, I think you kind of hit the, well, sorry, I can let you go first. No, no, go ahead,
David. Oh, I just wanted to chime in there. You know, we're going to have a lot of participants
and there are a limited number of prize slots and i i mean everybody's
going to be going after the prize slots of course but i i think fundamentally as a developer the
minimum thing that i'd love for anybody to take away with which has nothing to do with another
whether or not you've won a prize slot is are you actually able to build out an idea and demonstrate
that you've got a concrete idea that you can actually execute upon because that's where we
can actually slowly help transition you into an actual meaningful project with inside of our ecosystem.
And that's the destination I want to see a lot of the folks actually go towards is we're going to be on this journey for a while.
We're going to hopefully see you on other hackathons, other events, or just in our ecosystem building, going through the grants processes.
And not to be so much hung up on just like this is the only step that you're going to take into the Aptos ecosystem. But this
is the beginning of a journey of where we build a beautiful relationship together, where we work
with you to help you become a successful founder in Aptos. Yeah, absolutely. And to kind of add on
to David's point here, we see hackathons as kind of the initial stage, right?
Going back to that playground thing that I was referring to.
We want people to tinker out.
We have plenty of other resources for them to, let's say they build something awesome at the hackathon, but they're not as excited about it anymore.
Or they're excited about it.
They're excited about it.
And they're like, we want to take this to the next level.
And they're like, we want to take this to the next level.
We have those opportunities available for them.
But also coming back to exactly maybe the judging criteria here could be helpful for hackers to understand where we're looking at the innovation, right?
Are they addressing that real user pain point?
The technical execution?
Are they leveraging Aptos features effectively?
effectively, the impact of it. Do we see that real world potential there? A user experience,
The impact of it?
Do we see that real world potential there?
whether they are prioritizing the simplicity, accessibility, I'm really emphasizing the user
experience here. So I think these are the very key things that we're looking for. I also want
to emphasize that we don't expect everyone to be putting together the next big dap at a hackathon,
right? Even if you have a detailed
technical architecture doc that explains how these pieces would work together is something I'm really
excited to see. We want to see these applications run on Aptos Testnet. We don't expect a full-on
blown-up thing. A conceptual design of what you want to build is enough for me to understand
what you're excited to do. Spend time, get there, use those 24 hours to think and just put it down and figure out how
all these pieces fit together, right? And think of that innovative spirit. But yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head there, which brings us onto the prizes.
You alluded to them and the prizes are very, very exciting.
I think that some of the first place prize is pretty much as big as a grant in and of itself.
So Nuhia, could you share with us what those prizes are?
I'll let you have the honors of announcing those prizes.
Yes, absolutely.
Our first place is $20,000 in APD as well as USD. And to your point, exactly,
these are grants style prizes. The reason being is because we do want to see some exciting
projects that will eventually funnel into our grants pipeline as well. Second place, $12,000.
Third place, $6,000. Fourth place, $6,000. Fourth place, $5,000.
Fifth place, $3,000.
That is a lot of money, guys.
Sometimes I'm just like, why not at hackathons?
But yes, that is a very exciting prize pool.
If I was a hacker, I would be there grinding away for sure.
But yeah.
100%. Yeah, really, really exciting.
If I were a hacker looking at those, I'd be like, wow, that's really, really exciting. If I were looking at those, I'd be like, wow,
that's really, really exciting. But more than that as well, obviously, there are opportunities after the hackathon. And I think that is the biggest thing. I think especially when we're
looking at really top founders in the ecosystem, I know we have a lot who are tuning in that will
be listening to the recording after we send it to them afterwards as well. It's what happens after
that. So we'll come on to opportunities after the hackathon in a moment. But there's actually another piece to the hackathon, which is the travel scholarships,
which we're really, really, really excited about. So yeah, Anuja, tell us a bit more about the
travel scholarship and the type of people who maybe you want to want to see applying for one
of those. Yeah, absolutely. Actually, Phil, I will let you talk a bit more about the travel
scholarships. This is something that we have launched in partnership with EZA and really excited to see what kind of hackers we can target together
and bringing out to the hackathon, give them the opportunity to really shine through here.
Thank you. Thank you. No, I can't wait to chat. I'm glad that I have the opportunity to. So
I'm absolutely honored that, you know, Aptos are partnering together partnering together with easy and we're partnering together
on not just hackathon but also on the travel scholarships so we have travel scholarships
will which will be available to hackers who want to travel into consensus so the way that it'll
work is we'll be sharing more information about this on twitter or on linkedin um and also inviting
some of our top community members to come out.
But essentially, Toronto is in Toronto.
And so, of course, if you're listening to this and if you're on the East Coast of the
States, if you're elsewhere in the world, there's a little bit of traveling to do to
get there.
And we want to make sure that the best hackers can obviously make it out there in person
too and not necessarily have to worry about their own travel costs as well so
we have a pool of funds which we will be distributing to developers to build on aptos
and that will essentially either subsidize or completely cover travel costs to get to the
hackathon itself it will be may 14 to 16 which will be the date of the hackathon itself. It will be May 14 to 16, which will be the date of the hackathon.
And so that will be really, really exciting.
It means that really,
if you are excited about building on Aptos,
there's really no barriers to actually coming along.
There'll be travel scholarships,
there's gonna be prize money,
and there's gonna be grants afterwards as well,
which is a perfect segue onto the final section of this,
which is what happens after the hackathon.
Yeah, absolutely.
And David had mentioned this earlier.
I think one of the most unique things that we see,
at least when I see across the Web3 space
that I think Aptos really owns is we have a token accelerator,
TG, we call it LFM TG,
which is the fact that we are able to say, hey,
hackathon projects, you eventually have an end point where you can come and launch a token
with the support from the Aptos Foundation and more is, I think for me as a hacker,
so exciting and a big ticket that I'm waiting to get to as a founder, if it were me. But beyond that, we have multiple
other opportunities where we have grants programs that are available for them to apply. We also have
an MVP program that we're currently looking to launch in the next few months or so, where
projects can go ahead and get that one-on-one developer support within like a five-day boot
camp to really kickstart their project.
And then eventually we have a growth track, a GTM track that where basically there's support
every way.
All you have to do is just ask.
And in fact, we are also piloting a hub.
hub. We are probably, we're figuring out the title of it, LFM hub. It is hub of a sort where
We are probably, we're figuring out the title of it, LFM hub.
hackers can go ahead and submit their projects automatically into our portal. So we know that
these projects exist for us and they can let us know what kind of support they need. So this is
a one-stop shop for them to see what other hackathons are going on globally. Or, hey, I need build
credits. Can I go ahead and ask for build credits? This is essentially the place for them to go ahead
and do that. They can also, once they're ready, apply for those MVP programs or go ahead and ask
for those build grants, so on and so forth. So as soon as they have built that project on that 17th,
they're going to submit their application in through this portal. So we're really, really
excited to pilot this at ConsenSys. So I can't wait to test drive a lot of this at ConsenSys.
But the grants exist. The TGE is live. We're in fact launching our first cohort tomorrow
in Dubai. The LFM launch party is happening. So if anyone on the space is in Dubai, let me know,
ping me, DM me. I'd love to have you out there um alix i know is on here
she's done a wonderful job putting that together um and i mean she's it's yeah just come out meet
us in dubai there's so much more for you to do this is just the first stepping stone within our
ecosystem yeah are you giving me lots of fomo we're still we're still here at harvard uh would
have loved to come out to that and see all those cool projects.
Yeah, I'll just tell you guys this weekend, right?
Yeah.
So to summarize then, in terms of what happens after the hackathon,
it sounds like there are a couple of cool different programs, right?
There is obviously just, there's the hackathon, there's the prize money,
and developers are able to then take that prize money,
put it towards their own projects themselves.
There is the grants, right, which are the build grants, which developers can then use to continue
building out their projects. And then LFM is probably for projects who are a little bit further
along in their journey, right? These wouldn't necessarily just have come straight off the
hackathon. They're projects that have a little bit more traction, right? A lot more traction,
for sure. But and the other thing I also want to plug in here
is one thing that I really champion Aptos here
in the ecosystem that I'm actively working on
is regional accelerators,
something where we can have localized founders
build in their own accelerator programs.
And we also have accelerator partnerships.
One of the accelerators that's currently ongoing
is in Japan with the horizon, with the Japanese government, actually. I don't know if legally I
can say that, but it's a really exciting partnership that's happening. We plan to have
many more of those. And also a VC network of our own, right, that founders and builders can have
access to at that later stage as well. So I wanted to make sure I plugged those in.
Very cool.
Yeah.
I mean, one thing that we've seen ourselves
just firsthand, Dom and me,
we've seen the VCs are excited about Aptos
and the ecosystem.
And that I think is one of the,
sometimes the most underrated thing
that a lot of founders don't necessarily appreciate enough
when they're just coming to an ecosystem.
They're like, okay, well, the tech is good, right?
And I like building in the ecosystem.
But sometimes, you know, that's not enough on its own
to make a project successful.
Like you need to have all those different pieces.
And so that's obviously something that's fantastic
to see within the Aptos ecosystem.
100%.
I mean, I definitely think that like being at a foundation,
we take a lot of pride when our projects are successful and they're outside folks.
And when I say outside folks, I mean other VCs and partnerships that are willing to take bets on these projects.
Right. That really shows the true vibrancy of an ecosystem.
And we have that network available to share with the founders.
with the founders. So really excited for that. Fantastic. So that brings us then to the final
So really excited for that.
bit where we have a couple of questions that people have sent us, you know, to ask on this
basis. First one, why don't we, well, I'll take them in order that is most relevant to what we
were just talking about just now. First one is in terms of funding for the projects after the hackathon
and like particular programs, I think you touched on a couple of them separately. But I think this
question is really just focused around, you know, where do builders go? Is there something like,
you know, do they go into an accelerator afterwards? Or would they, you know, plug into
a grant program? Or what do you think developers should be going towards after that if they want to take that idea to the next level?
Absolutely.
I mean, the portal I'd mentioned.
In fact, they don't have to go anywhere after.
They're actually starting there.
So they're going to go ahead and apply through that portal.
Let us know that, hey, we've won X Hackathon.
We would be able to provide them feedback on their projects and be like, hey, we've won X hackathon, we would be able to provide them feedback on their projects and be like,
hey, we love this.
Maybe work on this better
and create that feedback loop for them,
especially if they're interested
in furthering along in that journey.
So rather than them going somewhere,
we actually have the perfect place
to have them enter through
and we can work with them from that get-go.
Fantastic.
Cool.
Second question that we have is ecosystem fund.
Is there an Aptos ecosystem fund?
Yes, we have a $200 million ecosystem fund.
So please let us know.
Build some amazing, exciting things for us to invest in.
Because yes, we do have an amazing ecosystem fund existence.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Really cool.
Are you able to explain like how the ecosystem works?
Like I think I've seen different ecosystems do it in slightly different ways.
And I think, you know, where the question is coming from, maybe like, you know, how,
how I guess people can tap into it, I guess, is that part of like the LFM program?
Or is that like, you know, a consortium of different VCs or is that capital that Aptos is investing, you know, from the foundation itself?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a combination of all of those, right? of wanting to invest in projects from a grant side to having partnerships with other VC firms
to have them invest in, us doing LPs into other firms as well for them to invest into Aptos-based
projects. There's quite a different subset of ways that this ecosystem fund is going to be dispersed,
but really at the core of it is to make our ecosystem better and focus on that global trading engine narrative. In fact, I'm going to
plug in a recent article that Ash, our head of ecosystem, had done on this. If anyone was to
search up Aptos $200 million ecosystem fund, I'm sure that's the first thing that pops up.
It's a great read, especially pre-h hackathon to get hyped up and really understand certain things that we're thinking through.
Another one is Avery had just put out one as well around the global trading engine,
specifically deep diving into what that means and being able to dissect that a bit further. So two
great reads for you as a pre pre work to the hackathon for sure. Yeah, pre-reading. We will be sending
out some pre-reading for that. Perfect. That'll be perfect for people to dive into. And then I think
the last question that we could really have time for right now is an example of a great dApp that
is in the AppTose ecosystem. So you don't necessarily have to choose any favorites,
but maybe you could speak to one that maybe developers could maybe look at beforehand as an example of what they should
be thinking about when it comes to like, you know, DeFi or payments or the money chain on Aptos.
For sure. I have a few, but I'd be curious to learn more about David. It's like David and I
are getting to learn about each other on the space. So, David, if you have any exciting projects that Aptos has that you're really excited about right now.
I've been quiet for too long.
You had to wake me up.
Just to call out, both Anuya and I just got here to Dubai, I guess, within the past 24 hours.
So we're hitting our limits.
And I'm just so impressed with how much energy Anuya is bringing to this space.
Kudos to you, Anuya. to you i knew yeah i'll crash hard
uh so i think in the the payment space one thing that i've been really enjoying a lot is uh if you check out super villains like they've done an amazing job integrating various different payment
options on aptos whether you want to take your APT or your USTE,
USTC, USTT, you can seamlessly buy extensions or DLC or whatever for their game.
And it works really, really smoothly. It's all done through their website, their front end.
They've done a great job integrating the various different technologies like Aptos Connect and
Keyless that allow users to not even have to download their wallets to seamlessly bring assets into games.
And so just on the payment side, I think that's a pretty cool thing that you could imagine
actually trying to generalize that, provide general purpose tooling for anybody that wants
to kind of like replicate the cool stuff that they've built in that space.
On the DeFi front, there's a plethora of DeFi applications out there, and I don't even
know where to begin. But I'll plug a couple. If you want to start first with getting to DeFi,
you go to your simple swaps. You've got some great aggregators out there. Panora and Kana stand out.
You can kind of start seeing how the Aptos ecosystem is integrated, where are our top
swaps. And then in that space, you can look into things like Hyperion, Solana, Thala,
as different applications that are doing pretty cool stuff inside of that space.
My good friends at Thala, they haven't announced it yet, but it's already live on their system.
You can actually go in and deposit pairs.
So like you can do a stable pair between USDC and USDT and you get outside of it, you get a,
what is it? A staked LP token that you can actually then put up into Echelon, which is one
of their partners, a borrow lend product. So you can get additional yield. And as you know,
sorry, all I do is talk about yield, but it's pretty phenomenal that there's actually really cool technology
that they're leveraging underneath the hood
to actually make this a yield bearing staked LP token.
And I'm not going to get into all the weeds on that.
My buddy, XeroxBE1,
said he was going to make a tweet about that
that goes into the awesome, cool technology.
But the reality is we've got lots of really cool technology,
both in terms of what happens behind the product
as well as what's happening in the product.
And so that's kind of like my,
if you wanted to check something out
before you get into the hackathon,
check out those various different cool projects.
Love it. Love it.
And of course, Yield.
We've got to do a counter
or the number of times that David talks about Yield.
Anuja, now you've got to take us away
and talk more about Yield then.
I know. Speaking of Yield, I mean, I've always been excited about
understanding certain global economies, right? When we look at places like Argentina with high
inflationary rates, there's plenty of people down there. Aptos has USDT that you can convert
into stables and generate yield, right? I want to see products like that that create
that user-friendly focus to it. But yeah, in terms of yield, I? I want to see products like that, that create that user-friendly focus
to it. But yeah, in terms of yield, I would love to see that. But another project I think that's
very exciting in Aptos because it's Kofi Finance. It's a liquid staking protocol that maximizes
users' yield, right? So there's a lot of yield staking protocols that are available for folks to leverage within.
As I said, the DeFi space is very mature on Aptos,
and I'm really excited to see what that payments to DeFi connection looks like at this hackathon.
Fantastic.
Well, I'll tell you, if people don't build yield at this hackathon, then I don't know what they're doing.
I know, exactly right.
Fantastic.
I think that's one thing that we are safely driven home then.
To wrap up then in the final couple of minutes, I know, you know, thank you again so much,
David, and Nia.
You traveled a long way to go to Dubai and it is late at night over there.
Final couple of sentences to wrap up.
I always like to wrap these up
with a couple of words of advice for builders.
I can kick us off and then would love to hear
from you and you here and then David,
your advice for builders.
I think one of the key things
that I've taken away from this space
is to really focus on what the ecosystem
needs and what the ecosystem wants. And I think that when developers come to an ecosystem,
it's really important to see, okay, what is it good for? There's some ecosystems which are really
focused on social life, or certain ecosystems which are really just focused on games. And I think
Aptos can do all of those things but i think that in particular one of the areas
that we've seen uh at least internally even at easy and at different hackathons and just from
the past track records of what different projects have been able to build it's the the financial
use cases are finance are just fundamentally so rich there's so much composability to be done
uh i'm very very excited about seeing those so i seeing those. So I think there's a reason that we've,
over the course of this space, talked a lot about finance. We've talked a lot about DeFi. We've
talked about payments. And the problem statement is as well, focused around global finance. I think
that in Web3 as a whole, fundamentally blockchains, they solve the double spend problem, right? And
that's really at its core. If you look all the way back to the Bitcoin white paper,
this is what it really boils down to.
It boils down to finance.
And so, you know, I'm really excited personally
to see builders build on Aptos
and build those financial use cases,
but tapping into for the first time, you know,
a chain that really has, you know,
pretty much everything all there, the speed.
It has the UX with keyless sign in. it's got, you know, potential for gasless
transaction, pretty much the world's your oyster, and you can build whatever you want. So I think
that'll be, you know, distilling that into some final words of advice, you know, take the bull
by the horns and build something cool that's, you know, a financial application on Aptos. But I'll
hand over to you and you're here and then we'll wrap up with David. Yeah, I think for me, I'm going
to give a very concrete is the fact that there's going to'll wrap up with David. Yeah, I think for me, I'm going to give a
very concrete is the fact that there's going to be so many resources present. David, the entire,
like half of the engineering team will be present there. We'll have at least like quite a few
engineers present. So please, please leverage us as your tools, especially while you're at the
hackathon. One thing I'm also planning to do is spin up office hours that you could go in and book with the team,
but also bounce ideas off, right?
Build its teams.
This is a great place for you to potentially meet
your future co-founder, right?
Learn to just go up there and just talk to someone
and bounce ideas and tinker, whiteboard,
and have that kind of energy to iterate fast
and fail fast and move fast in those
24 36 hours but yeah leverage the resources there and be willing to move fast David fantastic
so I think it goes to the point of what you need to do before the hackathon and also tie into who you are as a builder, as a creator.
I think fundamentally a builder creator needs to be building what they're excited and passionate about.
And ideally we find the intersection between what we're trying to accomplish out of the hackathon and what you're trying to do.
That's part of it.
I think the other part of it is we're not just going to the hackathon.
There's the next week and a half, we're readily available.
My DMs are open.
I'm sure Anuya's I'm going to offer.
Hers are open.
Message us.
Get engaged.
Let us know what you're thinking about.
Get some early feedback so when you actually arrive there, you are ready for your pitch to potential teammates,
to getting ready to just hacking and get your project out there.
It's going to be an intense 24, 48 hours.
And we want to see everybody be able to build exactly
what they want to build, give the presentation,
give that quality of work and that vision of what you're
building, make that really solid.
And so I'm just looking forward to being engaged with folks
and seeing them kind of to bring that their passion.
And so just make sure you come passion, bring passion and bring your passion um i also wanted to plug in the telegram chats
that we have available um or telegram dev group available as well it's a great place for people
to go and join um and use that as a place to get that initial feedback David had mentioned,
as well as Discord.
And I'll also have the team join the Telegram channels
that Dom, you, and Phil are making right now
in preparation for the hackathon as well.
So, yeah.
Fantastic.
Well, that brings us to the close of this space, but very much the beginning of the Aptos track at the EZA Consensus Hackathon in Toronto.
So we've had our official announcement of the tracks, of the prizes, the travel scholarships.
There's so much going on and so much. This is really, really just the beginning.
The hackathon is just the beginning. But everybody who's listening here, treat it as your launchpad.
Treat it as your launchpad into the ecosystem
and treat it as your starting point.
There's so much to do afterwards
over the next couple of weeks,
as David and Anuja just said.
Dive into it.
Have a look at everything that there is out there.
Figure out your team.
Figure out what you want to build
and come and just absolutely crush it.
So to wrap up, thank you so much, David and Anuja,
for giving up your time to be on this space today.
Really appreciate it.
And I hope you are able to enjoy Dubai and the rest of Token.
Thank you, Phil, Dom, EZI team for having us.
Take care, everyone.
Always a pleasure.
Good evening.
Have a great afternoon.
Thanks, everyone.
See you soon.
Bye.
Take care Thanks everyone. See you soon. Take care.
