In recent years, terms like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and others cryptocurrencies have been making headlines due to their skyrocketing prices. Cryptocurrency has seen unprecedented interest from retail investors and savers in volatile assets, and many experts have weighed in on whether this is right, especially as younger generations get involved.
The cryptocurrency craze has taken over the world, with Indian school students participating and excelling in the same! An example of this is Gajesh Naik, a 13-year-old Indian student who designed PolyGaj, an ecosystem for managing cryptocurrency money.
Gajesh, son of Goa civil service officer Siddhivinayak and PWD official Pranita, is a student in Class 8 at the People’s High School in Panaji, Goa. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, he began creating online educational content.
The content produced by Gajesh was intended to provide primary school students from vernacular schools with physical education lessons to combat the lack of them. Gajesh also used the time during the pandemic to upskill himself from creating chatbots to creating blockchain applications, while most children his age were learning online.
“Last year, when physical classes were discontinued due to the pandemic, I decided to take and complete some online certificate courses, including from University Buffalo, State University of New York,” said Gajesh.
When eight-year-old, Gajesh attended a coding Bootcamp, and today he is familiar with C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Solidity. The international blockchain congress, held at Goa in 2018 in collaboration with the Goa government, sparked his interest in blockchain technology, he said.
This year, Gajesh has created two decentralized applications (dapps) using the Polygon network. The apps – PolyGaj and StableGaj, offer crypto-investing to their users. PolyGaj may be a one-stop Defi (decentralized finance) and NFT platform that gives stable coins, whereas StableGaj provides stable coin exchange on the Polygon network.
Defi refers to non-custodial software programs that handle one’s cryptocurrency for them, without an intermediary like a bank or a funds manager. Gajesh currently manages $7 million in cryptocurrency, including investments by US billionaire Mark Cuban into the Polygon blockchain.
As of today, he actively participates in conversations on cryptocurrency on social media platforms, and he has accrued 22,100 Twitter followers, among them are Sandeep Nailwal (Co-founder of Polygon), Jayanti Kanani (CEO of Polygon), Dimitry Beterin (father of Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum), and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder of Paytm), among others.
In addition to his YouTube channel, he has created explanation videos about crypto that have attracted over 12,000 followers worldwide. Also, he is the youngest person to complete the entire Google Foobar challenge.
“Since the international blockchain congress, held at Goa, he equipped himself with requisite blockchain programming languages. Being a comparatively newer topic with less knowledge available within the property right, Gajesh takes direct tutelage from professors of MIT and Stanford,” said his father Siddhivinayak.
In addition, since online classes have resumed, the teenager plans to devote up to 5 hours to high school work while using the rest of his free time to figure on PolyGaj.
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