Dr. Sushi

02/23/2025

Token 2049 Singapore - September 24’

I organized a few events in Singapore for “Asia Crypto Week” - the largest conference for the industry in Asia each year. Story has a massive developer community in Asia, partly thanks to the team making the effort to work with local organizations on educational initiatives and exposure/marketing campaigns.

The goal here was to organize one good event where apps built on Story could share what they’ve built via product demos and connect with various funds looking to make early stage investments in our ecosystem. Definitely a success. We had 91 founders apply to speak at this event. The ByBit office was not big enough but I’m not complaining about “Standing room only” situations. Those tend to create fomo.

Singapore is weird. Amazing food, very diverse, overtly menacing (it’s an authoritarian SEZ after all), sterile, suprisingly affordable (if you’re not part of the service economy), and highly efficient. Whole place feels like a mall.

I had an insane experience visiting the Singapore Freeport, where the heir to one of Asia’s largest Art Handling and Storage vaults gave me a private tour of some of the display rooms. They filmed parts of “Tenet” there. Got to see works by Basquiat, Degas, Monet, Rothko, and a number of other seminal impressionists that have not been seen in public since the 1970s. Very tripped out experience.

Will be back in October for the next conference. World will be very different at that point I’m sure of it.

02/08/2025

Story Academy Saigon

Really great short trip to Vietnam to meet with some of the developers building applications on Story’s tech. Lots of talent here, 1 out of every 5 people in Vietnam own crypto - really great place to bootstrap a developer community.

Trip would not have been complete without a top tier bowl of pho.

01/28/2025

10/23/2024

Story Academy Taipei. September, 2024.

The next stop on this Asia tour was Taipei, a place known to be ripe with tech talent. We had a few projects actively developing applications on Story based in Taipei so the decision was quite easy to make a stop here.

We worked with a local VC put the event together and help spread the word to their local network. It seems like a rather tight knit community. Lucky for us, our project has been making waves globally so we had a pretty good turn out. It was the “who’s who of Taipei Crypto”.

Kicked off the day with project demos before taking a bus over to the dinner spot, an incredible Michelin guide recommended Cantonese Restaurant. Insanely good food but the room was full of great people, which is always most important. The food in Taipei is incredible.

Taipei was my favorite city we visited on this trip. While it’s definitely a large city, it doesn’t have the same bustle of the other Asian mega cities. It’s much more laid back, and seems like a place that allows interesting underground creative culture to flourish. I had a chance to do a performance on my day off in Taipei — so fun! Even throughout the back streets, it’s common to find a rogue tree growing through the cracks that has been allowed to flourish. It adds a lovely charm. These help considerably when it gets hot (it was like 95 and humid every day).

Now that we have a blossoming developer community here in Taipei, we’ll look to explore new ways to support them going forward as they build products using our technology.

09/22/2024

First stop on the Story Academy tour was Tokyo! We hosted a couple events and had a booth at the .asia conference. The goal was to meet every product team working with IP in the Japanese entertainment industries. Met so many interesting people working on cool stuff. Also saw some product demonstrations that were pretty out there. One company was trying to sell me a vitamin vaporizer that earns me crypto?

Looking forward to working more in Japan. Once we launch our Mainnet we should have some proven use-cases for onboarding IP safely and securely. At the moment the downside risk for something like permissionless remixing is rather palpable for something so sacred as legendary IP. it’s interesting to see that a company like created new IP to start experimenting with crypto/web3 - hopefully we see others follow.

Story will be here, thanks to the inroads we made during this short trip to Tokyo!

08/28/2024

Back in Japan! Kicking off 3 weeks on the road with the Story developer relations team as we host workshops and community days across Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Saigon, and Singapore.

We just launched our testnet and announced 140m in total funding to build the IP ownership layer of the internet. The tour is entirely in service to helping software developers and entrepreneurs build applications that utilize Story’s protocol for IP applications. Think TikTok or Bandcamp with fair attribution and royalty structures for commercial licensing, or ethical AI media models that ensure the data training sets are rewarding contributors.

Lots of work but finding time to eat well. Forgot all the Japanese I learned ten years ago.

06/12/2024

Next up: the inaugural Programmable IP Summit

03/05/2024

ETH Denver 24’ is a wrap! Absolute marathon this year.

Production highlights:

Story Protocol Booth at the Main Event. The theme we went with was “Men in Black training room meets Apple Store”.

Story Protocol “Builders Mixer” (DM if you want a 4 hour playlist of “remixed IP”)

workshop, ecosystem dinner, and house party (fav of the week).

PayPal sponsorships of the Unstable Summit, .crypto Summit, and hosting a Happy Hour with .

ZK Talks with .zk

DAO gathering

Serotonin platform dinner and lunch event with and

9 Serotonin produced events and a major booth production in the span of 5 days! One day I hope I’ll get to check out one of these conferences as an attendee or a hackathon participant. I was happy to have one night off to hang out with and homies.

Extremely proud of the Serotonin team and especially who was the best teammate throughout this entire process. So proud of you!

(Yes, that’s an immunity-boosting IV drip I got in the “Zen Zone”)

Next up: with the Aleph Zero Ecosystem!

02/26/2024

Heading out to my third today.
This was my first blockchain conference and it’s one of the best. There’s only 3 or 4 others that are on this level in terms of scale and quality of projects/developers involved.

The cultural applications and use cases inherent in this tech means that all walks of life come out for the week. You’ll find great parties, extremely advanced esoteric workshops, a million panel discussions roughly about the same things, super weird swag (anime body pillows??) and a ton of free food and drink.

This will be my first time doing a large booth production for a client and we also have 9 side events to produce in various capacities. Starting tomorrow morning I’ll essentially be working nonstop (7:30am-12am daily) until Saturday night. Thankfully there’s beanbags and lounge furniture in the “zen zone” where someone will be playing ambient music or droning on a gong. Reminds me catering The Masters which was 6am-12am for two weeks straight.

I’ll keep the stories updated throughout the week. Here’s some highlights from the first two years.