Atila was originally created with a very simple but ambitious goal: Give every student the money they need to afford a good education. Emphasis on the word every.

We had people from all over the world express interest in Atila. Although, we only promoted it in Canada. People all over the world sign up for the site. I had someone in Finland make an account, people from Nigeria were emailing and DMing us asking us to help them get scholarships.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t help every student. Can anyone guess why that is?

While the Atila website and many of the scholarships on our website can be used by any student anywhere in the world. 

The actual process of receiving your scholarship funds, aka the most important part is severely limited by the current banking system.

So Atila went from trying to help every student anywhere in the world to only focusing on helping students in Canada who have a bank account. While I wasn’t thrilled about this, I figured it would actually be good for us to focus on a more niche market and gradually, eventually, maybe one day expand to other countries.

Fortunately, there are a new set of tools and technologies that is going to allow us to go back to our original goal of empowering as many students as possible.

By using Cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, programming platforms like web3 and tools like Metamask. Atila will be able to provide scholarships and grants to students anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

I’m going to outline why we’re making this change and the roadmap for how we’re going to do this.

Why Now?

I’ve been following cryptocurrencies since about 2016/2017. During my reading week in February 2017, I travelled to NYC and slept on an airbed in my friend’s dorm room at Columbia University. I spent the month networking with people in the New York Tech and Finance industry trying to decide which field I should go into and what I should study. One day I was looking for something to do and decided to go check out a talk by someone called Joe Lubin to give a talk about this thing called Ethereum.

I really wish I remember what he said but I completely forgot. What I distinctly remember two qualities about him high integrity and high IQ. This guy seems extremely important and more importantly, I feel like I can trust him.

When I got back to Canada I shortly after bought a cold wallet (I was paying attention!) and bought my first part of a Bitcoin.

Fast forward a couple of years later and every once in a while I would attend an Ethereum Hackathon. To be honest, the main reason I went is that Ethereum hackathons always had the best food. I would mostly just work on my own web2 side projects.

This was also the first time I met Vitalik. I honestly think he’s one of the smartest human beings on this planet. I’m putting him up there with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The talk Vitalik gave was pretty technical so I didn’t understand most of what he said but similar to Joe I had the same high integrity and high IQ feeling: This guy is very smart and I feel like I could trust him.

As a technology enthusiast I love technology for the sake of technology but what I really love is seeing how technology can be used to make people’s lives better. 

As I talked to the people at the Hackathon I got the feeling that “wow, this is really cool stuff” but what’s the use case? What problem is this solving? How is this going to make my life better in any meaningful way? 

I saw the potential but I felt like they were at least 5-10 years too early. I politely nodded my head as they pitched their wares as I plotted how to make my escape to the free bubble tea food truck.

This happened for a couple more years. I would watch from a distance. Intrigued, curious, but still feeling like. “Nah. Not yet”.

Then in the last couple of weeks and I literally mean in the last week, I had an Aha moment. It’s time.

This is actually why I haven’t been doing any of the regular Atila stuff. I’ve literally just been obsessed with this space. I think the opportunity is huge!

Here’s why:

The most important thing is that it solves a very clear problem. The reason why I started my presentation with the goal of Atila is that the north star for everything we do is to help people.

Sometimes as an engineer, I’ve picked up a technology simply because I wanted to build something and then I made up a reason for why it’s actually a good use case.

Now it’s the opposite. I actually avoided this space for a while and now I feel like I’m being drawn by the people's reason as opposed to the technology.

Right now in this call, raise your hand if your parents immigrated to this country? So while writing this presentation I counted that 6/9 people here are either first or second-generation immigrants.

All of us have family in our native country that would benefit from Atila that can’t use our services.

People are Ready for it Now

The other big reason is that I think that people are ready for it now.

One thing many people underestimate is that technology isn’t the hard part. The hard part is consumer adoption, are people ready? Here’s why I think they are.

Big Tech is Entering this Space

Facebook recently changed its name to Meta to symbolize its move into the metaverse. I want to put into context with you how big this is: I’ve literally never heard of a company that’s one of the 10 biggest companies in the world literally changing their name to signify the new product direction.

Companies like Microsoft, Youtube, Amazon are all eyeing this space.

Celebrities are Entering this Space

  • Steph Curry bought an NFT
  • Grywnet Paltrow Bought One 
  • Kylie Jenner “alledgedly” is trying to buy an NFT

We live in a celebrity driven culture. While many people think they’re hesitant to try digital curreicnes and assets. What people are really hesitant about is buying something that no one 

else has done. People are conformists. By celebrities entering this space, it’s going to give people social proof and permission to use this technology.

Here’s how it would work.

What are We Building?

A platform that allows anyone to start and get scholarships and grants using digital currencies like Ethereum.

Using a tool like Metamask, users connect their wallet and create an account on Atila.

Sponsors create scholarships by connecting their Ethereum address/wallet and using their wallets to fund a scholarship.

Students make an account and connect their wallets to apply for scholarships.

When the scholarship ends a smart contract automatically distributes part of it to Atila and the rest to the scholarship or grant winner.

So the beauty of it is that it’s actually identical to the way Atila currently works but the primary difference is that instead of having to create user accounts with email and passwords and deal with credit cards, e-transfers etc. all of this will be handled by the blockchain.

Let’s talk about the benefits

Atila can Help More People

More Privacy

Sometimes it’s useful to allow people to be anonymous as well. Using this system users can make an account on Atila, apply for scholarships and receive their award completely anonymously. The only information they provide to us is their wallet address.

Faster Growth Rate

The Cryptocurrency industry is growing at extremely high rates and so it will also attract a particularly different type of market from the traditional market.

The crypto community has a lot of people that are:

  1. Very curious and open to experimenting and trying new things
  2. Have a lot of money

I think we’ll be able to attract sponsors that are willing to try our platform than would be the case with traditional finance platforms.

Great Learning Opportunity

I’ve always said that if you do it right, starting a company is like the ultimate school hack. Instead of paying someone to teach you stuff you get paid to help people solve their problems while learning. 

I think that the future is in web3 and there’s a lot of very interesting puzzles in this space that will be a great learning opportunity for all of us.

Smart Contract Compensation

Another benefit is that we can programmatically write rules for how our wallet should run. So part of the money will go back to the community, pay the ambassador, open source developers etc.

Then the other part of the money will be divided amongst the team with some % shared equally amongst everyone and some % distributed based on performance.

The Original Atila Will Still Exist

Some of you might be thinking that does this mean that we’re forgetting about the current Atila website? Absolutely Not! I think they will both exist and not only will they both exist but they’re both going to help each other. Let me explain.

How many of you know what the US Dollar is? How many of you know what Ethereum is?

How many of you know what a visa card is? How many of you know what Metamask is?

That right there is why we still need Atila. There’s a huge market of people that don’t know about any of the things that we’ve talked about. So we’ll have both sides on the website and my thesis is that we can actually move people between both platforms based on what their use cases are?

For example, some people might decide to use Atila Digital first and then decide they actually want to also sponsor a scholarship using our fiat website.

Next Steps

Today was just to paint the vision for the future for you so you can understand where we’re going. There isn’t much more for you to do today except to learn as much as possible.

Learn and Google Everything

Go on Google and every single word or phrase that I said today which you don’t understand, Google it. I’ve also included a bunch of links  at the end of this which you can check out

However, a mix of people spending more time online has accelerated a trend that I thought was going to be about 5 years out.

Resources

Note: If people prefer learning via videos let me know I will add try and find more good video links. However, I would encourage you to develop a reading habit because a lot of the really useful information only exists in text and doesn't have a video equivalent.