Serial ‘hackathon’ winners and brothers Phil Kwok and Dom Kwok saw this gap in knowledge in an industry they were so passionate about and decided they wanted to play a part in Web3’s adoption. Besides his passion in Blockchain, Phil had experience in creating a number of startups before beginning his job at a law firm. This combined with Dom’s experience at several investment banks meant they were both halves of a whole lot of relevant skills, and so, in 2019, EasyA was born.

Easy-ay?

EasyA is Web3 education on an app. In a nutshell, at least. But to save over-explaining, Phil sums it up best: “So you can think of us like Duolingo on steroids for Web3.”

Like in Duolingo, the app works by gradually building up your knowledge of the concepts of Web3, and the coding involved in it to begin building, through lessons. It then quizzes you on what you learnt and doles out various Cryptos or NFT certificates for successfully completing it. This is part of the trend of ‘gamified’ learning apps. Phil believes this combination of a gamified, app-only experience is part of EasyA’s success. “The problem we saw is that pretty much all these courses like Coursera or Udemy have very low completion rates. Only like 10% of all people who take up the course complete it. And for our mission to bring more people into the space, this wasn't going to cut it.” Phil goes on to explain that their way of doing the courses has resulted in a 40% and higher completion rates in comparison. This probably comes as a reassurance for the brothers, seeing as their app is the only one of its kind in the space.

Although it helps to have some knowledge of coding, the company’s goal is to get more people involved in the Web3 space. “Most of our community has a base level experience. So they will come in having already understood some coding languages but not maybe a language specific to a Blockchain.” Phil said. “Although, it is open and accessible to all people, regardless of experience.” This ethos is also why EasyA is a free app that doesn’t charge users.

Yet if it doesn’t charge and even pays users to complete its courses, then how are they managing to make money? “We work with foundations of these blockchains who are non-profits to basically get these courses sponsored. That is how we're able to make them accessible. That allows us to create the courses and then distribute them to people.” Phil says. This has proved not only successful in terms of funding, but feeds into another facet of the app: competitions and partnerships.

“We also have hackathons that we host, where we work with pretty much all of like the top 20 Blockchains, like Solana, Polygon, Polkadot, you name it. They then come to our hackathons where the people who did those courses within our app can go to, hack on their projects for a weekend and then, if they win, get grant funding afterwards.” Phil said. “We've given over half a million dollars away.”

This along with things like a news feed, regular coding competition drops and Web3 event listings mean that they have enough to keep users engaged with the app even long after many of them have completed all the courses on offer.

App adoption and Web3 turbulence

Yet, Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs, indeed many of the words often used in the same sentence as Web3, are in a tentative situation right now; Bitcoin has come down as low as 70% off its 2021 high and companies like Meta have pulled the plug on its NFT plans. How is EasyA positioned to withstand potential waning interest in the sphere prompted by a Crypto market downturn?

“The field that we're in is very different to that. So, there's tokens or Cryptos or NFTs, which are a small part of this pie, but then the much broader ecosystem is what's being built on the Blockchains themselves that these element run on.” Phil says. “The platform itself is slightly separated from the price of these, therefore we are a little bit isolated from fluctuations in that regard.” Phil believes that interest in the underlying technology divorced from any related token or Crypto prices means that their app is continuing to get interest despite market direction.

Other challenges are ones other startups could likely relate to: getting people to use your product. “One of our biggest challenges has been to build a community. How do we get people to download the app?” Phil explained. “We learned from our time working on university startups with zero budget, and what we cottoned on to was that we could replicate some of our moves from them and go to different colleges and universities to get people to download the app. Our experience meant we knew exactly how to do the distribution networks and leverage contacts there to get it out into those school newsletters, posters, you name it. As soon as we did that, we just honed the pitch to figure out what people were interested in. After that, the ball began rolling.” Phil’s experience just goes to show that even a startup that never got off the ground can still pay dividends years after it ended.

EasyA here to stay

Despite unfavourable Crypto market conditions, Phil and Dom’s efforts have grown EasyA rapidly in the four years they’ve been going: they’ve grown their team from two to 10 people in just under four years, had their app featured in a number of publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Independent and Apple’s App of the Day; partnered with some of the world’s leading Cryptocurrencies and tokens, and dished out a total of $597,950 in cash to participants at the world’s top universities like Harvard, MIT and Cambridge.

Yet, these accolades are secondary when asking about their highlights. “I think one of the biggest highlights is seeing the impact the app has had, not only in terms of numbers, but seeing how it's changed lives. Some of the teams that have come through originally started out inside the app, and then they've attended one of our events in person and gone on to raise money from venture capital firms due to their performance there; this has enabled them to completely transform their lives.” Dom says. “All from starting up inside the app, learning about that first Blockchain, then building out that project and then getting funding. The most recent investment one was from a16z, they raised $500,000, which values the company they invested in at a couple million dollars.”

Building off the back of these successes, EasyA is implementing a new design feature that they believe will continue to keep the community they have built engaged with the project as they expand. This paired with news that major Cryptocurrency Solana are releasing a phone that has Web3 functionalities leads EasyA to believe their goal of propagating the new iteration of the internet is closer than ever, and as that day dawns, the company are in a position to capitalise off of it.