Thread by @mystic_scholars

Why I dropped out of my computational biology PhD program to take on @AxieInfinity and Web 3.0 full-time.

A thread 🧵

AIM chatrooms, community-driven forums, early online gaming, and emergent content hubs. This was my experience with Web 1.0, and was the internet that I came to know and love. Here, most of the value went to the network periphery: users and builders.

Then, circa 2005, Web 2.0 came along. Although it accelerated the adoption and accessibility of the internet and internet-services en masse, it created a siloed framework where most of the value went to centralized entities.

This, in my opinion, slowly corroded the soul of the internet and the communities behind it. Users and builders were no longer accruing value, and instead were generating value just for the eventual extraction by these centralized entities.

Web 3.0 came into the fray, and the pendulum shifted once again to empower those users and builders. Web 3.0 is designed for its users and builders to OWN a part of it, facilitated by tokenized systems.

Concepts like: open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocols from @Aave and player-owned property rights from @AxieInfinity challenged the status quo of billion-dollar industries.

I had no choice but to pay attention.

Now, decentralized communities are reignited to collaborate and co-create. All while aligning their values and incentives by virtue of tokens, where the network participants work together toward a common goal: the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token.

Once I came across @AxieInfinity, I found myself going from a passive observer of web3 to an active participant. To me, @AxieInfinity will serve as one of the largest transfers of knowledge, talent, and value that we will see in our lifetime.

The game effectively takes MILLIONS of underbanked individuals and streamlines their access to some of the most sophisticated financial tools available (most recently realized by the ronin dex: Katana).

It creates countless pathways for people from all walks of life to rally and create.

Which led me to ask myself an important question leading to my departure: at what point do we still call @AxieInfinity a game?

This digital nation, @AxieInfinity, and the entire web 3.0 movement behind it challenge the way we think about human, financial, and intellectual capital. For this reason, I can't see myself focusing on anything else.

I'm here for us. I'm here for Axie. I'm here for Web 3.0.