Author: sarahh267

For as last day, we all met and ate lunch at a restaurant called Spring Rolls. We finally got to meet Greyson in person and we all talked for a while about the past week and a half. Greyson gave us some advice about college and jobs, and we all had a really good time talking and reflecting on our time doing the work experience program!

Today, we started off by going over some of the research we had done the day before. We then started talking about what story we wanted our presentation to tell and different ways to do that. We worked on finalizing our presentation with some corporate templates and during our second meeting of the day, we presented it. I’m really excited for tomorrow – we’re meeting for lunch to talk about this last week and a half and finally meet Greyson in person!

Today we were assigned new topics to research between our two meetings. Rohan and I researched VR – what the market looks like, where it’s going in the future, what’s holding it back from going mainstream, what are potential uses for it in the future. We had some good conversations about how it’s use cases and consumer demand that really creates a market for a technology and how because most consumers can’t justify the price and trouble of a VR headset, it’s not taking off. After that, Greyson showed us some research and market analytics tools that he uses when he has to put together presentations.

An Oculus Quest 2 VR headset

Today we did something a little different. Instead of presenting the research we had done previously, we took a little break from NFTs and blockchain and worked on some team building and communication by playing a game called Valorant together. We were all on the same voice channel, telling each other where enemies were and what our plan should be. We didn’t end up winning a whole lot of games, but we had a lot of fun.

Today, Greyson had a meeting in the morning so instead of our morning meeting, we just kept working and making progress on our research. After watching the first 15 minutes or so of a podcast with Garry Vanderchuck and Mark Cuban about the growing market of NFTs, I continued research on something called DAOs.

DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization. It is essentially to the business world was cryptocurrency was to the economic world – a way to cut out the middle man. With cryptocurrency, people got around the need for banks by decentralizing everything using blockchain technology. DAOs make use of this same technology and they cut out the need for CEOs and boards of directors. Instead, these companies have no central leadership and are owned by all the members of the company collectively. Every transaction the company makes is transparent to its members and all the rules and code for the company are laid out in smart contracts, which are also accessible to all the members of the company. DAOs, like NFTs, are another way to utilize blockchain so that ordinary people can work together and take back control from large organizations and governments as we move into the next phase of the internet.

Today, we started off with our morning meeting. We briefly presented what we had worked on the previous day and then launched right into discussing our final presentation. One of our goals for the two weeks is to complete a presentation discussing how NFTs work and what their potential applications could be in the future, as well as why a potential investor should be interested in them.

After the meeting, all the students in the WEP joined a call together and we worked on our table of contents; we established a narrative that we wanted our presentation to tell. It felt cool – almost like we were a real team putting together a real presentation for a potential investor. After our afternoon meeting we all came away with new research topics – I’m researching decentralized autonomous organizations.

Today we started off our day with our morning meeting, where we all presented the research we had done the previous day. We asked questions and did additional research on topics that we were curious about, and by the end of the meeting, we were all more well-versed in NFTs.

We left the meeting with new topics to research. I continued learning about the environmental impacts of NFTs, but this time finding some concrete statistics and studies to back up my claims. I also did some research on the different types of consensus mechanisms of blockchains – the algorithm used by a cryptocurrency to add blocks to the blockchain. I spent most of my time researching a newer, more energy-efficient consensus mechanism called Proof of Time and Proof of Space. This method uses hard drive storage and less energy-intensive processes instead of raw computing power than other methods, namely Proof of Work.

The company Chia uses Proof of Time and Space in order to be more eco-friendly

Today was our first day of the Work Experience Program working with Lenovo. We talked with our host, Greyson Davis (the head of the software gaming division at Lenovo), and asked him questions about what it was like to work with Lenovo and with video games, and especially how it’s been working from home for so long.

We spent the rest of our meeting time talking about and learning the basics of NFTs, and discussing their potential applications for gaming and in the real world. NFT stands for non-fungible token, and essentially is a unique, secure piece of data that is stored on the blockchain. These tokens can be transferred – bought and sold like any other physical good. Right now they’re used for things like digital art and collectibles, but in the near future they could be used to securely store things like concert tickets or house deeds.

Today after our meeting, I researched the environmental impact that NFTs and NFT transactions could have.

An image of Cryptopunks, a set of 10,000 unique images that became some of the first ever NFTs