At the age of 13, it is hard to believe that anyone can understand the potential of holding a $500,000 private key in India living the life of an average seventh-grade student—and the responsibilities and dangers.
The 13-year-old decentralized finance (DeFi) prodigy Gajesh Naik from Goa is so unique because he can design a DeFi agreement that can accept $1 million in investor funds, but he is too young to sign legal contracts or Take responsibility for any loss. Would you believe that your money is given to an unproven young developer who has only half a year of Solidity programming experience?
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time flies
Naik started from the YouTube channel, taught people to code, and then turned to smart contract consulting. Today, his DeFi protocol PolyGaj manages nearly $1 million.
Given his age, it is interesting to see how he sees time, rather than years or quarters, Naik spent a few months talking, “I worked as a freelancer for three months and started two projects.”
Although many people think that three months of blockchain consulting experience is nothing more than an internship, Naik describes it in a way that makes it sound more like a career stage, as if it is more suitable for the following statement three reference year instead month.
This is to be expected, because young people naturally think that time happens more slowly-one year may be equivalent to Up to 20% of a 10-year-old child’s “conscious” life, Equivalent to six years for a 30-year-old person, or ten years for a 50-year-old person. not to mention, speed With age, the speed of information processing slows down, which means that young people’s ability to absorb and use new information is much higher. Therefore, Naik may be correct to regard his three-month consultation as the basis of his career.
With what we call “rich” industry experience, relatively speaking, Naik launched his own project after graduation, Polyge, Which is based on a similar platform on the Binance Smart Chain called Goose FinanceThe elephant-themed DeFi platform of the same name allows users to trade and grow tokens, namely PolyGaj (GAJ) and StableGaj (SGAJ). It is also possible to put tokens in the pool, promising that the APR of Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) is as high as 34%, and the APR of Tether (USDT) is as high as 62%.
StableGaj is not a stable currency
-gajesh.eth🌋 (@robogajesh) June 26, 2021
Also worth mentioning is Naik’s “Elephant Punk” Non-Fungible Token (NFT), which sells for about $25. As of this writing, the platform has locked up approximately US$900,000 in investor funds in its farms and pools, while the address of Naik, who “owns” the platform, holds approximately US$500,000 in GajCoin, which makes Naik both relative and absolute. All are very rich.
From student to teacher
Naik started coding in early 2016 when he was 7 years old when he participated in a two-week coding, starting with drag and drop Training Camp In his hometown of Goa on the west coast of India. At the beginning of 2017, he studied Scratch more deeply, a programming language designed for children, and then learned C and C++ in the second half of the year. The important year was 2018. He “learned Java, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript”, opened a YouTube channel to teach programming to others, and started attending programming gatherings in his area.
Given that his father Siddhivinayak has a degree in computer science and works in the Indian civil service, Naik’s enthusiasm may not be completely random.He certainly won’t be the first person to like computers father Support their children to become crypto geniuses. Pratik Gandhi, Covalent’s marketing director who assisted in arranging the interview, mentioned that he has an Indian background and can comment on Naik’s family status. He quickly added that Naik’s enthusiasm came from himself. This is not a situation where parents let their “children learn something to show off.” He described it as a common phenomenon in India.
Of course one cannot force passion or love of learning-both of which are owned by Naik. He even encouraged other family members to start making videos, and his mother Pranita opened a cooking channel.
Nike’s first video Starting in 2018, How to use Dialogflow to make a simple Telegram Chatbot, Well done by any standard.Followed by a list, including The great unsung science hero Set as a musical accompaniment, and there is a short film called Coffee and code October 2018, It shows Naik, a visibly excited and smiling 10-year-old boy at a coding party. He was there with about 20 other people-they were all older and lacked some kind of undeniable spark of excitement and surprise, as the presenter explained something about server load.
His scope has expanded to courses such as creating 3D geometry in Python and crawling Wikipedia, and even has a course called How to use Python to analyze and visualize COVID-19 dataHowever, perhaps the most prominent is Naik’s course How to find compound interest using python, He was released on September 3, 2020-in the same month, he “participated in a webinar on the basics of Bitcoin and blockchain.”
“I started to delve into the blockchain-Bitcoin and Ethereum-and then I learned about Solidity, and then I learned it in two or three months.”
To understand the importance of this statement, one must consider the value of Solidity.According to an industry Job bulletin board, “The average base salary of Solidity developers in Asia is US$125,000 per year, the low base salary is US$100,000, and the high base salary is US$150,000.” An analysis by Payscale shows that the average annual income of Indian software developers is US$6,700, which means When Naik was 13 years old, he had mastered a set of skills that were worth 10-20 times the salary of an experienced developer, or 50-70 times the country’s salary per capita GDP ($2,100).
Naturally, Naik continued to share his learning on YouTube and introduced Bitcoin to his audience in 12 minutes in October video Contains illustrative images of piggy banks, gold bars, and circuit boards. From there, he shifted the content of the channel to focus on blockchain-adding commentary videos on Yearn.finance, Chainlink, Tether, etc. in November and December.
A few weeks later, in February 2021, the situation changed when Naik expanded from a mere introductory video to How to deploy smart contracts on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) with How to write and deploy BEP-20 tokens on Binance Smart Chain. At that time, at the beginning of the video about the creation of ERC-20 tokens, Naik made a announcement To his 10,500 subscribers:
“I started freelancing! If you want to create DApps, smart contracts, tokens or coded NFTs, please email me.”
Small challenge
Naik has nearly 20,000 followers and is a rising star on Crypto Twitter. He describes it as “good and bad-some people are targeting me, some are threatening me”, adding that some people will say ” You should study”, or he is lying about his age.
Some concerns may be right. The PolyGaj platform and its elephant NFT and word games can of course be regarded as children’s experiments and games. At least compared to any other cloned DeFi platforms run by anonymous creators on BSC, this does not reduce its legitimacy, but people will doubt whether children can truly understand the nature of their money and the real power it has.
🙂👍
Encryption is balancing the global competitive environment. The only connection you need is an internet connection. https://t.co/mc98GqNgUK
— Balajis.com (@balajis) May 21, 2021
There is also a security issue, because everyone from friends and teachers to local criminals knows his wealth-and it can be accessed with just a few keystrokes. When asked if he was told if he would share his private key with his parents, Naik didn’t seem to understand the importance of this question.
It is important to realize that, as an industry, DeFi has accepted a laissez-faire “test in production” philosophy, that is, to create projects in an experimental way, and investors take risks and take their own risks. In this sense, Nike is very suitable for the crowd. If he chooses to create his own platform anonymously, it will blend with others.
However, so many DeFi projects were created anonymously for a reason—namely, legal, reputation, and security risks—and Naik now associates his reputation with the public, indelible crypto assets named after him. Although this is certainly a remarkable achievement, if I were his parents, I would feel uneasy.
Although Naik explained that he agreed not to disclose which tokens he created or how much he received as part of his consulting work, it is safe to assume that these contracts take the form of gentleman agreements. This is because due to age, Nike may lack the legal ability to sign an enforceable contract-and therefore does not assume any responsibility.
According to Gandhi of Covalent, this lack of ability to sign contracts means that he cannot obtain direct investment from “some well-known people in the industry” who are “waiting for him to be 18 years old so that they can transfer money to him.”
I can’t debate and investigate 13-year-olds, guys. Honestly, I am not sure what to do here. I may have to avoid the “minor with administrator key” situation and let you solve it yourself. pic.twitter.com/x2ZeKe8iDu
— Chris Black (@ChrisBlec) May 21, 2021
Make way for the ambassador
Part of the reason we are speaking today is that Naik can promote his work as an ambassador Covalent, An index and query layer for decentralized systems that can extract information from multiple blockchains.
Ceo Ganesh SwamiAlso joined our conference call, describing the Ambassador Program as a “Growth and Leadership Program”, and its 2,000 and growing participants were selected after the interview process. Once accepted, the “ambassadors” set goals-usually to expand their own learning related to things like data and dashboards, which are Covelant’s main business.
It’s not clear what Naik’s ambassador’s goals mean, but it’s fair to speculate that he got some reward for his undisputed bravery in accepting this interview-apparently allowing a 13-year-old young man to cause media attention.
Generation Z
According to Naik, one of the main problems in the blockchain space today is the high cost of natural gas. This is why his project is built on the Polygon framework. This factor allows him to deploy tokens for as low as $0.01, while the first layer of Ethereum may require hundreds of dollars. He also advocated the same point in his YouTube tutorial-which proves that emerging blockchain enthusiasts will go beyond the first layer of Ethereum to build the future.
In my book Brockland, I think Bitcoin is a joint venture between Millennials and Generation X. The oldest representative of Generation Z was still in high school in the early years of Bitcoin and was basically unable to participate. The younger and “fashionable” Ethereum subsequently became the home of the industry’s Generation Z, led by Vitalik Buterin, who is similar to Zoomer.
Seeing that Naik is actually a member of the young Z-generation-maybe even the early messenger of the Alpha era-chose to build on Polygon, which is the second layer solution of Ethereum, which is fascinating. Due to the high gas cost, the Ethereum ecosystem may need to rely more and more on the second layer of solutions, because the first layer is difficult for today’s young crypto geeks to experiment.
Many of us will remember that in the early days of the Internet, parents looked at us and their children in surprise and commented on how big the world is for the new generation, being able to communicate with friends all over the world, and so on.
When we consider the reality that a 13-year-old child can create and expose a decentralized financial solution and sell NFTs to a global audience, in contrast, the abilities of young people only 10 years ago seem outdated and weird.
Teenagers who used to sell mixtapes or pirated movies from lockers can now accumulate large portfolios on the blockchain anonymously, and no one has the right to stop them. The future is theirs.
Five years later, Naik thought he was ready to enter the University of Computer Science. However, if things continue, he is more likely to find himself a teacher among his peers.
