Host: Blair Zhu, Brand Director of Mint Ventures

Special Guest: Leah Valente, the President of Cornell Blockchain Club.

Background and Mission Evolution

Blair: Hey everyone, welcome back to Web3 Founders Real Talk. We’re here to bring you unfiltered conversations with movers and shakers in the industry. In recent years, the academic community has increasingly become involved with crypto, blockchain, Web3, and gradually evolving into a powerful and well-structured force of support. Today we have a very special guest, Leah, the president of Cornell Blockchain Club. Thank you for coming, Leah.

Leah: Thank you for having me. Super excited to be here.

Blair: Do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? What led you to crypto?

Leah: Yeah, I’m a rising senior at Cornell in the College of Engineering. I studied operations research engineering, which is basically a compilation of computer science, optimization, probability, and data science. I got into crypto back in 2021. Actually, I stumbled upon Blockchain at Berkeley YouTube lecture series and watched that all the way through, then realized that the Cornell Blockchain Club was a pretty prominent club on campus. We had a class. I can talk more about it later, but it’s a student-run, student-created content class. I enrolled in that class. It was a two-credit class. That was my freshman spring. I joined the Cornell Blockchain Club that same semester. Ever since then, I have become very involved in the club and learned everything through the club, which is pretty awesome.

Blair: Wow, that is very interesting. Since you are becoming the president of the club, we’d love to know some backstage stories about the club. I did my own research and I found out the Cornell Blockchain Club was founded in 2017 to improve the awareness of Web3 and catalyze real-world use cases of blockchain technology. Can you also share some stories behind its establishment, and have the club’s missions and objectives evolved in response to the changing and also very fast-paced blockchain landscape?

Leah: So we were founded, as you said, back in 2017. I think we were the second blockchain club in the United States that was founded. I think Penn beat us to it. But founded in 2017, it was a small group and it was actually advised by the current CEO of Avalanche, Emin Gün Sirer, which is really cool. We have an awesome relationship with Avalanche. It started out as a small group of undergraduate students and the founding principle was basically to democratize Web3 education. So they met in little classrooms and they did blockchain fundamentals lectures. It was very education-focused in the beginning. And then as the years went by, there were lots of structural changes. At one point we had just an advisory team and an R&D team. Now we have around six sub-teams. So over time, it kind of went from more of a lecture-based classroom-style teaching structure to hands-on projects. Right now we have an accelerator program, which is a six-week program where pre-seed Web3 startups apply and go through mentorship. They speak with other Web3 founders. They have a lecture series and then they pitch. When we got to the Cornell Blockchain Conference, we actually did a live demo day, which was awesome. We have a consulting team. So very semester to semester, we partner with Web3 startups or companies in the space and do consulting work for them. So that’s a broad range of things based on the project, based on the company. We have a governance team. So we’re active in the Arbitrum and Optimism forums. We have an engineering team. So we send teams to hackathons and this team also organizes development workshops. Then we have an education team. I mentioned when I got into the club, I was in the internal blockchain class. It’s a two-credit class that actually listed on our Cornell registrar, which is pretty cool. This education team is creating slides, creating problem sets, teaching the class, and it’s all student-run. We have an advisor who sponsors our class and oversees everything, but everything is student-run and created by our undergrads. Pretty cool. And then we have our conference planning team. We joined forces with Cornell Tech down in New York City, which has a separate blockchain club. And we do the conference at Cornell Tech and we combined forces and planned this entire conference, starting in September for an end of April conference. So that’s kind of how our current club structure is. It’s definitely changed from a small group of students who met in classrooms, and kind of just had educational experiences and conversations. Of course, we still do that now, but it’s definitely more hands-on and team-based.

2024 Cornell Blockchain Conference

Blair: Yeah. I would say it’s becoming a lot more mature now because you guys are offering very extensive resources in all aspects. That is really impressive. We will definitely touch on that because it sounds like it’s not going to be like a 100 people team managing all those stuff, right? So we’re going to talk about some operational challenges later. But speaking of conference planning, you guys just had a really amazing event. It’s called l2024 Cornell Blockchain and under the theme Building for Billions, focusing on onboarding the next billion users onto Web3. You received rave reviews. Everyone was talking about it. Could you highlight some key moments or key insights for those who couldn’t attend? I’m one of them.

Leah: Yeah. As you said, our theme was Building for Billions. It was our 2024 Cornell Blockchain Conference and it was our fourth annual conference. So we saw with the Bitcoin ETF getting passed, onboarding the next billion users was this year’s theme. And we kind of catered our seminar talks around this theme of onboarding the next billion people into crypto. One of my favorite talks was by a past advisor, as I mentioned, CEO of Avalanche, Emin Gün Sirer’s keynote. Basically, the main idea is to make smart contract programming and audits a lot more accessible. So anyone can be a smart contract developer and it’s through combining AI and blockchain. So basically you would create a subnet or a blockchain on the Avalanche blockchain. It’s a modular blockchain. So you create a little subnet and basically, that subnet would be programmed in a natural language like English, Spanish, or any language that you speak. And you’d have a set of validators in this blockchain that would run LLM. Basically, you would just be able to input like, “I’ll give Blair $100 if the Yankees win.” So this transaction starts a chess game and the winner gets 100 AVAX. And then you wouldn’t have to code what to do with every move of chess or anything like that. You could create the removal of a smart contract programmer because you could be like, “This transaction creates a lending service that does X, Y, Z.” So it would be you’d actually write it in English and then you would submit it. Basically, these validators are running LLM, so one could be ChatGPT, one could be ChatGPT3.5, one could be ChatGPT4.0, and one could be Google Bard, now Gemini. Like any LLM, they’re all running in parallel and they execute this for you. It would kind of remove the need for smart contract developers or put another way, it could make everyone a smart contract developer. So I feel like that was a very cool idea that was proposed. Emin said that we’re at least five years out because AI is definitely very young still, Like these LLMs. When I send it in my Probability homework, it confidently tells me the wrong answer. When dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars, I think we have a lot of work to do, but it was a super cool idea that Emin shared and definitely on the note of onboarding the next billion people because anyone can write in plain English something that you want executing or done. I can just highlight a few more main ideas we had. The CTO of Privy was talking about how the next wave of people are going to be getting digital assets through interacting with products like playing games, going to restaurants, getting points, and posting on DeSocial. So Jane Lippencott from A16Z came on and did a permissionless markets panel, which was awesome and they talked a lot about decentralized social. Those were some high-level themes. And then definitely the need, especially in the realm of DeSocial, like taking your crypto from app to app, taking your followers from platform to platform, or your assets from game to game. Like that, it was a huge idea. That was definitely a theme during the conference as well.

Blair: Wow. Do you happen to have any videos? I do want to go back and do my own research because it sounds like a lot of highlights or insights have been shared by those players. It could be really valuable to us.

Leah: Yeah. We have a Cornell Blockchain YouTube and I believe our username is Cornell blockchain. But if you look up Cornell Blockchain Conference 2024, the videos are posted there. So everything is up there. I think some didn’t make it recorded, but if people are interested, they’re definitely all up there. I know Emin’s keynote is up there, Asta Li from Privy is up there. All of our main keynotes are up.

Current Focus

Blair: Okay. I guess my next question is how does Cornell distinguish itself from other universities in the crypto space? Since you guys are doing pretty well on conference planning, and also you mentioned that you guys were the second club established for Blockchain Web3. I do know that Cambridge and Harvard, have their own blockchain clubs as well. Can you maybe just elaborate more about the current and upcoming programs that the club offers? Because I know you talk about the main structure, you guys have an educational team and a conference planning team. So what’s your major focus right now?

Leah: Yeah. As you said, a lot of these other clubs have a class often, they have an accelerator program, and they host a conference. And they have engineering teams and hackathons. So there’s a ton of overlap with the different sub-teams at the different schools, which is awesome because we can talk with them and figure out what they’re doing on their engineering team and we share ideas back and forth. Things that make Cornell Blockchain different, I think, are some programs that we have. So we host this Blockchain Summer Bootcamp with the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation. So Joe Tsai is the chairman of Alibaba, I think he owns part of the Nets. So we collaborate with the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, the Social Justice Fund, and the New York Department of Education to put on this six-week Blockchain Bootcamp for Brooklyn High School, public high school students. This is an awesome initiative that we have. This is our third summer that we’ve done it. It’s six weeks, it’s Tuesday, Thursday, usually 5:30 to 7:30. And all of our students in the club that are working in New York, many of them intern in New York or live in New York, they go after work and they can TA this class. So it’s kind of an extension of our intro to blockchain class that we have at Cornell. But it’s during the summer, it’s an awesome way to keep people engaged during the summer. I think every summer we teach around 50 to 60 high school students. So it’s an awesome initiative that we have. I think that’s coming up in a few weeks. That’ll start in early July.

Blair: Wow, you guys are covering high school students. That’s awesome.

Leah: Yeah, it kind of goes back to our core value of democratizing Web3 education. I think our founders believed in 2017, that blockchain was education. Blockchain classes and research were reserved for PhD students. So the whole point was to open it up and simplify it for everyone to understand. So it all comes together there.

Biggest Challenge

Blair: Yeah, I guess that’s still a major barrier, especially all those technical stuff could be really overwhelming for new beginners. So that’s definitely the silver bullet for Building for Billions. If we want to make sure everyone’s getting involved, then we need to make sure that all those educational materials are quite seamless or quite barrier-free for them. What has been the biggest challenge in managing all those diverse activities? You guys covered blockchain education, sub-project development, pretty hands-on with all those conferences, and planning social activities as well. I can see you guys participating Consensus as well, trying to foster a really strong community. It sounds like a lot of work, especially you were saying that most of them are students. And also, you have your major, you have your homework, and you’re juggling a lot in between. So what could be the biggest challenge?

Leah: Yeah, I think you kind of highlighted it right there is that like being a full-time student, and then this club, anyone on the executive board, it’s like a full-time job. So just being able to balance that, like every single student on the executive board, for example, running the class, two lectures a week, an hour a week, you’re creating new problem sets, you have to prep the class, you have to teach the class, you have to hold office hours, that alone is 10 hours a week. And that’s just for the class. So our head of education is super busy and has full autonomy over the class. And then the accelerator team, our head of accelerator is booking lectures and office hours and mentor meetings and meeting one-on-one with four to six startups. Every single sub-team is doing something completely different. And it all takes a lot of time, planning, and preparation. So that conjoined with being a student is a ton of work, but I think it’s taught us the most valuable thing about how to manage our time. And then you also mentioned travel. We’ve traveled to the USC Blockchain Conference, we go to Harvard pretty much every year, Penn’s conference. Penn, I think is the oldest, this year was their fifth annual conference. So they started one year before us and they’ve been having an awesome conference every year. So we always try to go. But also it’s like traveling, you have to miss class sometimes. It’s just like balancing everything. I think that’s been the biggest challenge. And then definitely turnover is a tough issue to face because each position, each sub-team leader is only in their position pretty much for one to two years max. Every time it turns, everyone has to relearn or learn for the first time actually how to do everything. Like the conference, that was a learn-from-scratch planning experience. And next year, I think it’s another learn-from-scratch. So I think figuring out how to better onboard and transfer materials down the line to the next leader of whatever part of the club is something that we should work on and focus more on. And I think it’s definitely not just our issue. We’re in university for four years. So I think all clubs are experiencing this turnover and kind of formalizing that process to make it smoother for the next person is something that we’ll try to work on more. Then I think the last thing would be trying to get a more technical group. This kind of ties into being full-time students. To learn Solidity, Rust, and the Web3 through tech stack in general, you have to be pretty intrinsically motivated. It takes a lot of work. It’s confusing. It’s not like straightforward at all, in my opinion. So I think we hosted workshops and had a Solidity class that we’re going to bring back, which was also two credits. In the order of classes, you take the Intro to Blockchain class and then you take the Intro to Solidity and EVM class afterward. So we’re going to bring that back. But we have materials, we have a Solidity textbook and an Intro to Blockchain textbook, but it does take a lot of time. It’s very frustrating, and learning anything for the first time is tough. So I think that is another thing that we get our freshman class when we onboard a new member’s class, getting them up to speed with the technical side of things.

Student Interest in Web3

Blair: Well, it sounds like exactly a crypto early startup situation, especially speaking of the high turnover rate, I think that’s some challenges that every single startup will face nowadays. How can we make onboarding much smoother? How can we make sure all those tech stacks are easy to pick up? Those are some real legit issues that we’re facing right now as well. So I would say you guys are definitely doing an amazing job, especially it’s really good to see a bunch of blockchain advocates in universities basically doing things without pay. You guys are very self-motivated all the time and you just love this industry. You want to make sure you are able to move the needle here. So that is really impressive. Well, based on your observations and your personal experience, do you see many American college students interested in Web3? Like you said, you’re doing all those onboarding with all those newbies. What type of Web3 topics or trends are they most concerned about? Is there a significant interest in getting involved in Web3? For example, they just want to be your club member or they want to become a builder or they want to have crypto Web3 as their career path or something like that.

Leah: I think a lot of students early on joined for the speculation for the meme coins that they hear about on Twitter. And then slowly transitioned to caring and learning more about actual blockchain projects and things of value that will help our world. Our club right now is pretty interested in DePIN. So projects like Render, Filecoin, and Helium. And then I think maybe I haven’t mentioned yet, the DIMO, which is a Cornell-founded DePIN project. Basically, it’s like an IoT device and you plug it into your car and it collects different car metrics, miles per hour. I don’t know a lot about cars, so I can’t list that much. But then data that people who are really into cars would care about and also data that like you own, so you can sell that data. You make money from having the device in your car. So that’s a pretty cool use case and Cornell founded. DeSci is also pretty interesting. We worked with our consulting team’s last project was with Athena Dow, which is a DeSci company that’s working to fund efforts in women’s health research. So they allocate tokens towards startups that are researching women’s health, like breast cancer research and stuff like that. They were researching different data storage platforms. I think data is a big theme right now. And it was definitely mentioned a lot in our conference as well.

Blair: Definitely. Those are pretty much the buzzwords of the year, like AI, DePIN, and data. So how do students typically learn about those informations and enter the Web3 space? Because I guess I already have the answer. They definitely come from your Blockchain Club and they can take lessons. And also, as you mentioned some of them probably would browse information on Twitter. Is there anywhere else? Maybe some public resources? Are there any noteworthy trends or discoveries that you would like to share?

Leah: Yeah. As you mentioned, I think a lot of this is self-discovery on Twitter. But with our class, what we’re trying to do more of is once we finish our Blockchain fundamentals curriculum, to bring in founders and people at these new projects to speak at a very high level, like what they’re doing and why it’s important to students, to anyone. So to bring in more guest speakers like that, I think in the past, we’ve done that. And that’s an awesome way for people to learn about these different projects. Then just through our sub-teams, like the consulting teams partnering with a different blockchain startup every semester. So they’re learning about these projects and working alongside them, which is cool. Another way for them to learn more.

Views on Twitter & Regulatory Environment

Blair: Okay. I have a question that might be a little bit tricky to answer. Do you think Twitter is the information hub for Blockchain? Overall, do you think it’s a good source of information?

Leah: I think it definitely depends on who you follow. Actually, during our new member Ad, we listed off some of the big people that everyone should be following or the companies that everyone should be following. But I think there’s a lot of misinformation as well. You have to be careful. But I think it’s a good starting point. It’s a launchpad. Like I read something, maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s right. But I’ll research the project on my own and I’ll do my own thing and maybe research it from a reputable source. But it gets on my radar, which I think is important and cool. So it’s like working, but you’re not actually working. You’re on social media and it’s entertaining. But you’re also learning. I think being active on Twitter was kind of like I’m constantly learning everything. I think that helped me understand the crypto culture, which can’t be something that you just have to experience through time and in the blockchain space. Being on Twitter has helped so much with that, whether it’s good information or bad information. I think you can get an idea of how people think and what people are doing.

Blair: Yeah, do your own research. It’s like a critical piece, especially I’m debating as well sometimes because you could get really jam-packed information from Twitter and you just don’t know is it all those legit or are that false information? But sometimes we need to do our own research to be able to be selective or be able to identify those information. I feel like that’s why Cornell Blockchain could be a really good source of education. You build up all those courses and also you invite over those seasoned entrepreneurs or big players in the industry and they get to see the frontline stories from those people. That is really amazing. I do have another tricky question for you because as we can see in the United States, things change and also evolve rapidly this year. We do see Bitcoin ETF, we do see Ethereum ETF got past and also those are pretty pivotal moments and milestone events for crypto definitely. But also we do see a lot of controversial stories around SEC and Uniswap, Metamask, even Coinbase, and Binance. So how do you view the current regulatory environment in the United States right now?

Leah: Yeah, definitely the Bitcoin ETF was huge. I actually worked at Fidelity last summer. I think it was early June when BlackRock filed for the Bitcoin ETF. I was on the Fidelity digital asset management team, which was filing the Bitcoin ETF at the time. It was awesome timing there. I think right now the United States regulatory scene is still pretty unclear. We can see in Europe, that there’s pretty explicit and concrete regulation that’s going out, but we still haven’t gotten that yet here. I think during the conference, a lot of people mentioned this, especially in our institutional adoption panel. What it’s doing is driving innovation outside the United States, because if you’re going to build here and then just one day get sued, it’s discouraging people. I think we have a way to go. I think that once everything is more explicit and there are clear rails for what is allowed and what is not, we’ll see a new burst of building and innovation, which will be exciting, and hopefully, it’s in the near future.

Future Vision

Blair: Yeah, especially for some DeFi projects, DeFi founders, they’re really concerned about their own safety in the US right now. And I’m pretty sure they would impact their enthusiasm for the whole entrepreneurship. We will see. I feel like we’re getting there and we’re going to have a lot more clarifications along the way. Well, looking ahead, how do you see the role of the Cornell Blockchain Club or other university blockchain associations involved in the broader blockchain ecosystems? I guess my question is, what’s going to be your next move in Cornell Blockchain Club? Or how can we help enrich the entire blockchain ecosystem?

Leah: So we recently have decided to put on a fall hackathon. Cornell has never hosted a hackathon. We’ve had our conference for the past four years. So we’re joining forces with Columbia, NYU, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and all the big blockchain clubs on the East Coast. And we’re going to go to the hub, New York City, to put on a huge hackathon. We’re super excited about this. It’s a new undertaking. Hopefully, it’ll bring a bunch of builders from all these awesome top schools, and awesome blockchain clubs. I think the theme for the future among all these clubs is more collaboration. Putting on this hackathon together is a concrete way to collaborate with these other blockchain clubs because it’s pretty hard to actually do projects with other clubs, like research projects or consulting projects. But I think putting on actual events is an awesome way to talk to other people and other clubs. There are a lot of fun, big learning experiences. We’re super excited to announce this new hackathon coming up.

Blair: Wow, that is really impressive. Definitely, that’s the way to go. I mean, we need to onboard the next billion developers first before mainstream adoption. Did you guys make an announcement yet?

Leah: No, we have not. This is very early.

Blair: Here’s a sneak peek. So we’re going to have a hackathon, and all those builders and developers please stay alert.

Leah: Yes, exactly. If you’re an L1, L2 interested in getting involved, please feel free to email blockchain@cornell.edu. We’re still very early in the planning process. We want to make it as big as possible and get as many different chains involved.

Blair: Wow. It’s going to be a fun ride. Are we going to be able to see another Cornell Blockchain Conference this year or next year? Are you guys planning it? Just give us a sneak peek of it.

Leah: Cornell Blockchain Conference 2025 will probably be in April. So we just had this year’s conference, April 26 in New York City, and we actually do it at the Cornell Tech campus, which is an awesome venue for conferences and probably will be where our hackathon is going to be this October. But the planning process for the conference starts eight months in advance. So we’ll probably start in October or September or probably after the tentative hackathon. But yes, expect the 2025 Cornell Blockchain Conference. Every year they’re getting bigger and better. So don’t miss it.

Blair: Yeah, stay tuned. Thank you for sharing all those information. Thank you for doing all those great things for blockchain, for us. Because we definitely need to really remove the barrier, lower the barrier for newcomers, and make it much easier for them to enter.

Leah: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Blair: Thank you.