April 22, 2022 was an epic day for Lorenzo Melendez, 22, and Ulysses Atkeson, 21, lifetime friends and promising blockchain entrepreneurs.
Following three months of building their Cypher Accelerator, a support program for young crypto and blockchain companies, Lorenzo and Ulysses were ready to pitch their business to the public at the Accelerator’s grand finale event, known as Demo Day.
They stepped up to the front of the room at Wharton’s Stevens Center for Commercializing Crypto Success at Demo Day was validating, say the ‘Cowboys,’ who graduated from Kent Denver High School in Colorado, U.S. (where they were world robotics champs four years in a row), and both attended Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (Lorenzo graduated in 2021 and Ulysses will graduate in 2023). “It was great to see that others love the things we love to create,” notes Lorenzo, who calls their past three months working with Cypher pure gold in terms of connections and deep support. “It meant that we are on the right track.” Fresh off their victory, Lorenzo and Ulysses (aka Uli) sat down with Wharton Global Youth to talk crypto, blockchain and Web3, the name that many computer scientists and engineers have given to a new internet being built using decentralized blockchains. Cowboy hats in hand, they agree that this new world is truly the wild, wild west. “There’s a really big difference between where blockchain is and where it’s going,” says Lorenzo, who is NFT (non-fungible token) or knows how to interact on the blockchain.” So, where is the business of crypto and what can we expect from this radical new financial network? Lorenzo and Ulysses give us a peek into the commercial crypto terrain. Pudgy Penguins. First step is to understand Cowboy Labs, a business operating in the new crypto and blockchain NFT Incubator for start-up companies. Where do you fit in? Lorenzo and Ulysses admit that their generation, including today’s high school students, will have a commanding influence on the direction of Web 3.0 as a business industry and a financial practice. In fact, Cowboy Labs works daily with Vedant M., a high school student who is a complete wizard in the infrastructure of discord, the main communication platform for crypto. Ulysses encourages all teens to be curious, questioning and cautious. “There’s a lot of money flying around the space, and a lot of market dynamics are really complex and not well understood,” he says. “Don’t just throw money at crypto. Can it be used to make money? Yes. But you need to be intelligent about it.” Lorenzo urges students to embrace coding and development. “If you want to be involved in the crypto space, it’s really important that you understand how it works at the lower level. Ultimately, that’s what’s defining everything,” he points out. “You need to know at some level how the contracts work. You don’t have to put up $1,000 to test a smart contract. You can write a smart contract in Solidity language. You can get Truffle, which allows you to deploy the contract to the blockchain, and you set it up to do it on what’s called the test net. You can create your entire decentralized application or your idea that you have in your head, but you don’t have to use real money to do it.” Conversation Starters What is Cowboy Labs’ business model and how promising is the start-up venture? What is Web3? Do you agree that Web3 is too big to fail? Why or why not? Are you an Source link 
