Alejandra Borda, WH ’23, Lima, Peru
This year, the Career Services Summer Funding allowed me to dive fully into the potential of using web3 and blockchain technologies to generate positive change. I was first able to connect with any early projects creating emerging strategies and new potential implementations of this technology on their missions. Being able to help many new founders think through different ways blockchain could accelerate their mission exposed me to a wide range of recent earnings about various industries. For example, within climate, blockchain enables increased transparency and traceability and eliminates double counting from carbon markets. It also allows the fractionalisation of carbon credits and publicly verifiable transactions. Working with early-stage founders within this sector led me to do several deep dives into carbon markets, backed natural assets, ways to govern the commons or even exploring the possibility of voluntary markets for other ecological assets like biodiversity or clean water. Using tokenised assets as a way to encourage certain behaviours that protect instead of destroy the earth systems is fascinating.
Along the same lines, I was also helping companies like Molecule and VitaDAO launch their new IP mechanism, IPNFT. This allows increased collective ownership of the IP for scientific discoveries. I became proficient in the incentives behind science funding, publishing papers, the big problem in reproducible science, peer review and founders dealing with tech transfer offices. My involvement in generating content and opportunities to explore how web3 can enable improvements in climate, regenerative finance, decentralised science, privacy and security, and financial inclusion has opened many doors to find intersections between these.
I have also been heavily involved in community building. Web3 is a super early industry, and it is a ripe time to help grow it in a way that supports human thriving. Hence, I have hosted a dinner series called “Technologies for Humanity’ bringing together technologists working on creating amazing goods worldwide. I also co-organized Funding the Commons to bring together thought leaders on funding public goods and many smaller events that enable cross-pollination and collaboration across funders solving big problems in the world and exploring how web3 could accelerate their missions. This includes speaking opportunities at Ethereum events like Schelling Point, ETHBarcelona, Sustainable Blockchain Summit, etc. By highlighting the term impactDAOs to represent every project using web3 to create social good, the term became widely used in this industry. This created network effects of more and more people reaching out to seek advice when they begin their impactDAO.
It has been an absolutely fantastic summer with a lot of learning, growing and helping amazing founders to scale their missions.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2022 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here.
