It was September 2021 when I did the deep dive on web3 and blockchain. What sparked my interest was the concept of the “ownable Internet” and how it is positioned to change the way we do finance, business, and computing in the future. I also wanted to build a social network that was owned by the users and saw that decentralization would be the perfect tool to do that. I took a course called CryptoZombies to learn Solidity and have been building ever since.

I was speaking with a friend and mentor of mine, Damian Murray, earlier in 2022. We spoke often because we are like minded individuals who are both interested in business & tech. One day, he told me about an upcoming program by TMCF that would immerse students in web3 and the metaverse. I was all in and applied late February.

I didn’t have much experience with metaverses. The only platform I knew was Decentraland, one of the first metaverses I played in because of its ease to log in with a MetaMask wallet. After watching movies like the Matrix and Ready Player One, though, I grew an interest in the concept of technology giving us new worlds with unique economies and purposes. I knew it would create a boom for the economy sometime in the future.

The MetaScholars program started on March 22 and ran to May 26, the last 4 days being a pitch competition where we competed with students at an in-person session. It was put together by Thurgood Marshall College Fund’s Tamaria Kai Perry (Assistant Vice President of Innovation and Entrepreneurship), Damian Murray, Vincent Hunt, and Amanda Kuff. On the first day, I knew this program would be intensive and great for my personal growth. We needed to be on time with cameras on before we got the Oculus; we started with basic metaverse training. From the basics of tokenomics to the most popular metaverses today, the first couple weeks of programming were mostly informational.

Over time, we had more and more challenging assignments and had meetings across worlds in VR. One of my favorite assignments was to get together with a team in Horizon Worlds and build a new world.

Blaise, Kyle, Brandi, and I after building a new world in Horizon

The Metascholars are meant to be metaverse leaders-in-training and therefore must be great presenters in-world. On Tuesdays, we’d have presentations from scholars. We learned about lots of things from world creation to cyber security in these sessions. For my presentation, I presented my startup Minnet: a social platform for DAOs to build better communities. I had so much fun presenting and got amazing feedback from the mentors and the bright people in my cohort.

Every Friday, we had a fireside chat with people who were moving and shaking the web3 industry. We had talks with people like Memme, who showed us around the African museum of the metaverse in Cryptovoxels. We were able to see the wonderful museum and learn more about how the metaverse can be used to elevate black voices.

Metascholars in the African Museum of the Metaverse

The gaming in the program was one of my favorite parts. Sometimes we’d get with our mentor and play a game in the Oculus. My favorite game was EchoVR. I ended up playing it enough to get pretty good, and in one of our last games I got 25 points!

From May 22 to May 26, we participated in The Pitch as Metascholars. This is a 4 day competition where teams put a business pitch together and compete for prizes. My team, Team Phoenix, walked into the competition determined to win for the first Metascholars cohort. The problem we wanted to solve was the disconnect between physical and digital identity & data ownership. Our solution was Mutiny: A decentralized storage protocol that stores an Internet user’s private information and acts as a universal login/ID. Team Phoenix consisted of myself, Zion Melson, Blaise Davenport, Marcellus Northington-Winston, Nicholas Hardin, and Georgiana Wright.

We worked hard during the time we had to refine our pitch, and I’m really happy to say we got 1st place! The judges said our idea, business model, and financial projections are what put us over the competition.

Here’s a list of a lot of what I learned over the program (doesn’t include things I already knew):

• How to use an Oculus Quest

• How to share a deck, maintain posture, and troubleshoot while presenting in the metaverse

• How to build a world in Horizon

• How to make a Ready Player Me avatar (an avatar that works across worlds)

• Learned about lots of cool projects, companies, and organizations pushing crypto/web3 forward

• Metaverse teamwork

The list goes on, but I feel like the most important thing was that we learned how to function professionally in the metaverse. This is a skill that actually needs to be developed, and the MetaScholars made that easy.

MetaScholars Cohort 01 was a blast, and I can’t wait to see what future cohorts have access to and bring to the table. I had a great time and really am grateful to have this as my last undergraduate activity. If you’re an undergraduate student interested in learning about web3 and the metaverse, be sure to apply for Cohort 02 next year!