Santa Monica, California, Oct. 07, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Since his entrepreneurial journey began in December of 2015, Christian Deciga, a co-founder of Everipedia, helped build it from a Web 2.0 startup to a promising leading blockchain company in the emerging Web3 industry. Today, Deciga and his colleagues at Everipedia are not only experiencing the industry’s current renaissance coined “DeFi” short for decentralized finance, they are a part of it. After becoming the best wiki and knowledge base hosted on the blockchain, the team is now working on bringing different products such as “knowledge oracles” within the DeFi space onto the Everipedia platform as part of its knowledge vision.
This is his journey of how we went from a college dropout, surviving crypto’s bear market after the 2017 ICO boom, appearing in a music video with rapper Juicy J, to riding atop the DeFi wave.
First Generation Mexican-American
Deciga was born in Lakeland, Florida to an immigrant mother from Mexico and raised by a stepfather who took him in as his own. His real father left him before birth. Growing up as a first generation Mexican-American, his stepfather would often move to different cities for work building pallets. He moved around the country with his younger siblings and parents having lived in places such as Dothan, Alabama, Marietta, Georgia, Dallas, Texas and Illinois.
Supporting his family with McDonald’s pay; Branching out into EDM
At the age of 16, while attending North Garland High School, Deciga was also employed as a McDonald’s cashier often working a full time shift after school to support his family at the time. His mother was unable to work and his stepfather had been deported when they lived in Atlanta, Georgia. Adopting a stoic philosophy, keeping calm, never complaining, and always keeping an ambitious mindset, helped him face such external hardships in his life. CZ, the founder of Binance, and Deciga, both share similar stories as teenagers, as they both worked at McDonald’s to support their families. He went on to graduate from North Garland High School in the Class of 2010, with another classmate he now collaborates with, Johnathon Nguyen, known by his stage name Juyen Sebulba. Nguyen is an established electronic dance music artist signed with Yellow Claw’s Barong Family Label. Nguyen’s collaboration with Yellow Claw “Do You Like Bass?” has been played at festivals around the world. Using his new skills learned at Everipedia, Deciga is collaborating with Nguyen to help his music project Psycho Boys Club be the next big musical act in electronic dance music.
Creating His Own Path
In October 2015, as an undergrad student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science at California State University, San Bernardino, Deciga met Mahbod Moghadam (his former mentor), and Sam Kazemian, after they gave a presentation about Everipedia at Cal Poly Pomona. After the presentation, Deciga became an early contributor to the site, starting the entries for notable technology entrepreneurs Balaji Srinivasan and Luis Iván Cuende (both still do not have entries on Wikipedia almost 5 years later). In December 2015, Deciga withdrew from his classes at CSUSB and moved into Everipedia’s first headquarters, a penthouse apartment (PH2 at 972 Hilgard Ave.) located on UCLA campus to work on the project full time alongside co-founders Sam Kazemian, Mahbod Mogahdam, Travis Moore, and Theodor Forselius. While working on a prototype of the iOS application for Everipedia, Deciga learned the tactic of social media optimization helping bring in millions of pageviews to the site in the process. Many of the early Everipedia entries Deciga created would be shared widely across social media sites Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. Blogs and news sources would also use his entries in their publications. The New York Times cited his entry on Natasha Stoynoff during the 2016 Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. During this time, the Everipedia team began to grow, and grab the attention of notable people in the tech industry as well as critiques.
One of the co-founders of YouTube, Jawed Karim, emailed the Everipedia team interested in investing, but pulled out right before their announcement of building on the EOS blockchain in late 2017. Also near the end of 2017, Dr. Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, joined the young thriving company as Chief Information Officer (he resigned in 2019).
During his time working on Everipedia in Westwood, Deciga lived as if he was a college student living on campus. He would go to the John Wooden Center to workout, shop for groceries at Ralph’s, and even attended wild frat parties on campus. In early 2016, he saw President Obama leaving The W in Westwood surrounded by his security detail. Deciga also met and mingled with tech millionaires and CEOs at award ceremonies and parties in Los Angeles. The Everipedia team eventually grew out of the PH2 penthouse apartment in Westwood, and now has offices in Sweden and Santa Monica, California.
Entry into Cryptocurrency and Web3
In late 2017, Deciga was thrust into the lucrative world of cryptocurrencies when the team announced that they would be building their native cryptocurrency “IQ” token on the EOS blockchain. In early 2018, Everipedia made headlines when they raised $30 million in funding from Galaxy Digital, an EOS VC ecosystem fund.
Everipedia is currently one of the biggest projects on the EOS blockchain. It has become the largest decentralized application for learning and launched a prediction market called PredIQt in 2019. Thiel Fellow William LeGate leads PredIQT as its CEO. In June 2020, the IQ token was listed on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume. Everipedia has growing community editors from around the world including Nigeria, Venezuela, China, and Korea. Editors are rewarded with the IQ token for contributing to the platform, whereas on Wikipedia, an editor is not rewarded for their contributions to the site. This is the future of the internet known as Web3, where anyone can contribute value to the internet and be rewarded for it. The team saw huge success in tokenizing the idea of Wikipedia, putting knowledge onto the blockchain, decentralizing it, utilizing IPFS technology to host and store information. By using IPFS technology, Everipedia is a true decentralized application, meaning that it doesn’t run on central servers like current Web 2 applications run. This makes it almost impossible to censor content as certain outlets like Wikipedia face in countries such as China, Turkey, Russia, etc.
Everipedia and EOS in Popular Culture
In February 2019, Deciga alongside co-founder Sam Kazemian and former co-founder Mahbod Moghadam made cameo appearances in Juicy J’s music video for “Let Me See”, featuring Kevin Gates and Lil Skies. In the music video, EOS code written on a chalkboard written by Kazemian appears in the video. Kazemian, Deciga, and Moghadam sporting black tees with the Everipedia logo appear behind rapper Kevin Gates as he is being “pitched” how the internet is going to be the next big thing. The video made headlines in the EOS blockchain community at the time.
The New DeFi Kings
Two years after the IQ token was deployed on the EOS blockchain, Deciga and his current colleagues at Everipedia are now on the ground floor of cutting edge technology. They plan to introduce DeFi primitives such as synthetic assets (IQ smart assets), lending+money markets, and leverage onto the Everipedia platform. They are also working to deploy the IQ token on other blockchains including Ethereum, Binance Chain, and Polkadot. This is all part of the team’s mission to become THE knowledge and DeFi platform that has a presence on every reputable blockchain network.
Email : christian@everipedia.com
Phone: 310-905-4952
Follow Christian Deciga on Twitter & Instagram
https://twitter.com/ChristianDeciga
https://www.instagram.com/christiandeciga/
Media Details
Company: Everipedia
Name: Christian Deciga
Email: christian@everipedia.com
Website: https://prediqt.everipedia.org/
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