Cohort 3 Closing Ceremony

Transcript

Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for the closing ceremony of the women in Ethereum protocol study group cohort 3. I'm Puja Ranjan. I basically wear multiple hats in the Ethereum ecosystem. Primarily I'm focused on communication coordination and any protocol support that is needed for Ethereum mainet with a group called Ethereum caters. Together with Latana Higgins and Shye Wang, we co-unded WE in early 2024 and uh this is a little over the year but we have completed three cohorts. It sounds amazing. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome you all

today. Whether you have been part of this journey as a participant, supporter, mentor or Ethereum client developers, we are so grateful to have you with us. Over the past 3 months, we have learned, collaborated, and grown as a cohort committed to making space for women in Ethereum protocol development. Today is about celebrating you, your effort, your brilliance in the community we are all trying to build together. In the next hour or so, you'll hear reflection from cohort 3, perspective from ecosystem leaders and a few exciting announcement about what's ahead. Later in the program, we will also be spotlighting some incredible

voices from the cohort with presentation and updates lined up for you. But before we go ahead with our presentations and today's agenda, I would like to welcome our co-founder Ladonna Higgins to say a few word about how we brought it here. Yay. I'm so excited for today. Congratulations to everyone who made it through cohort 3. It is such an exciting time. Um, I am just honored to see the uh the initiative growing and seeing so much participation and so many people in the ecosystem willing to help further this initiative. It's near and dear to my heart. Um, I came up with the idea of WIP just to kind of identify some of the

issues that women were having in the ecosystem. What were some of the hurdles that we needed to overcome to get more women in the space? Um, and I was just lucky to partner with Puja and also now executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Shawei Wang. We worked on this initiative together from the beginning and it's really an honor to see Shawei go from researcher to executive director of the Ethereum Foundation because it is really a journey that she can speak firsthand to of like you know coming into the Ethereum Foundation being a woman almost the only woman at the Ethereum Foundation on the research team and now being the executive director. So, I'm so

excited to see how WIP will grow over the next coming months and years with her spearheading and also just lending her experience and now also her voice to further the the initiative. So today we're here just to celebrate all of you guys. Whether it was, you know, you completed the entire work study, whether you identified areas that you wanted to grow in, whether you made connections, whether this cohort was just your first step of understanding the ecosystem, whatever that journey is for you, want to celebrate it today because sometimes it's just the first step that we need to take in order to identify where we want to go. So I am just honored to be here.

I want to say thank you to Katchcha for doing an amazing job with cohort 3. Like I said, everyone is contributing to make this initiative grow and Katcha. I am just in awe of what you have done with cohort 3 and I look forward to working with you more going forward. So I won't take up much more time. I will speak again at the end of the programming but we will go on from there. Thank you guys and congratulations for completing cohort 3. Thank you so much Ladana. It's amazing that we have came so far. You mentioned about Shye Wong now being the co-executive director of Ethereum Foundation and for people who may not know it, Katya has also shown a lot of progress from being a participant of W

study group. She is now kind of facilitating the entire cohort. So kudos to you Katya. Thank you. Maybe even that bump in again. Puja and say Shawei unfortunately couldn't be here today. When we planned this, I didn't take into account that it would be midnight her time. So when she reached out last night and I was and I know how heck her schedule is, I was like, "No, no, no. We'll wait until we have better timing for her to join and to speak, but she will be coming to speak to the cohorts of WIP." That's amazing. Yeah, as Latina mentioned, she has some announcements at the end of this session today. So stay tuned and we would be hearing more about what's planned for our year ahead and

progress. Very well. Perhaps we can quickly kick off with a small presentation about WE for people who are new or watching us for the first time. So W started with a belief that we want to have diversity at the protocol layer. It is essential for the future of Ethereum. And through study groups, mentorship and hands-on engagement, we wanted to create a channel for communication. We wanted to open doors to meaningful contributions that can be made to the ecosystem. With each cohort, we see more impact, more confidence, and more community building. Cohort 3 has shown great results. In WIP, our mission

is just to bring diversity. We want to empower our women with providing support and education. We are trying to make sure that we do provide the technical resources and learning programs. I'm sure those who participated in cohort 3 have seen them firsthanded. We want to create a global community. We do organize different networking events and obviously we are going to see the impact that cohort 3 has created today. The purpose of this study group is to obviously explain about what Ethereum protocol is. If people are a little scared, little skeptical if they can be a part or if they can be or contributed

to Ethereum ecosystem. We want to ensure that yes they can and whatever is needed we want to bring them in an easy way to follow with different initiatives. Our long-term vision is to have a balanced and decentralized Ethereum ecosystem. This is a look of our milestone. As I mentioned in the beginning of this conversation, we started back in 2024 and so far we have organized multiple events at different locations just to ensure that we get participation from all over the world. Today we are celebrating the closing ceremony for cohort 3. Highlight of cohort 3 will be explained by Katya in a few minutes. So

just briefly speaking we did some workshop we had some guest speakers and we made some contribution to Ethereum client teams GitHub repositories. People who missed may follow the GitHub repo QR code right here and the YouTube playlist. This has contained all the guest lectures that happened during this course and also some of the sessions which were there in order to make girls feel more comfortable. They can join and ask some questions. What's next will be explained by Latina. But just on a high level, we would want to keep contributing with the PR. You can also join us at the upcoming event. will be

providing more information about the next event that we are planning to have at ECC and Devcon connect and Ethereum protocol fellowship has started a new cohort so you can also participate in that that is good next step after graduating from WIP cohort we will talk about cohort 4 the date hasn't been decided yet but we will get to have more information soon again I would like to thank all our guest speakers client devs who helped supported go this cohort very smoothly who held hands of participants and enabled them to make their either first PR or subsequent PR that they have been making to the Ethereum ecosystem to our

supporters those are not the part of cohorts but also supported with all other facilitation I would like to give a shout out to Koko and Akash for helping us with all of these things and last but not least the facilitator of cohort 3 Katya for having this smooth transition from learning and beginning their journey in the Ethereum ecosystem to making the final PR. Yes, of course. Uh this is our um social media handles as well as some of the contacts. Feel free to reach us here and that's all about the WIP. I am sure that people would like to continue joining this group and would be sharing

word more about the initiative the effort that we are having here to onboard more women in the Ethereum ecosystem. With that I would like to now invite Katya who happens to be EPF cohort 5 fellow. As I mentioned she has been WIB past cohort participants and an incredible cohort facilitator for this one. she would take us on a journey through what this group accomplished. Floor is all yours Katya. Thank you Pua. Hello everyone. My name is Katya. Sharing my slides. Okay. So as Puja said I've been a fellow from one and two cohorts and for this cohort I have been facilitating the group and I would like

to share some insights and make an overview of the cohort. So for this cohort we had 122 applications and uh 23 fellows joined this cohort and our community is really international. So with predatorium all over the world we have fellows from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda India Russia Canada Turkey and Hong Kong. That's great to see it on the map. We are growing. So we started our cohort in February and the journey took three months. Bi-weekly we had uh five office hours. During office hours we invited guests from the protocol and

we also had five standups. On the standups we discussed how to solve protocol issues and any other questions our fellows had. And we also had 10 home assignments for our participants to master open-source contributions. And today on the 1st of May, we have a we're leading a closing ceremony. So in opensource we learned so many topics like how to fork and clone repo how to open a PR, how to merge rebase and cherry pig and uh all these skills were gained by our participants and for this we used our WIP repo and we have 75 PRs merged into it. Yes, it's just

open-source training, not Ethereum protocol yet, but it will be the next step. So, we learned a lot about Ethereum. We had guests from the Ethereum Foundation, from client teams, and we learned about the governance, about Ethereum protocol fellowship. We learned about consensus and executions client, and of course, EIPs. The main part of the program was to make our first contributions into the protocol. So we worked with loadar prison bassu and consensus specs repose and we have 11 PRs opened and four PRs already merged and that's a great job

because contributing into the protocol is so so complicated. It's so hard to do this contributions. So our participants did a great job. So thank you very much. I really appreciate your participation and um your all your questions, all your hard work during this cohort and I hope to see you on our next cohorts. Thank you so much. Thank you Katya. We bring the perspective of existing contributors hoping that it can be inspiring and it can help increase our presence. We are grateful for the support and inspiration that we have received from leaders in the broader

Ethereum ecosystem. Please join me in welcoming our guests. Our first guest today is Morgan William, co-founder of Block Retar. Welcome Morgan. Hi. Hi everyone. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited for for all the ladies graduating here. I'm really excited to see what you guys build coming up soon. On my side, I'll just do a quick presentation because, you know, I was not so sure about the format. So, hopefully this works. Okay. So, a little bit about me. My name is Morgan Williams. I am the co-founder and COO of Block Radar. And I'll tell you a little

bit more about what Block Radar is in a minute. But as for me, I've had a quite an interesting career cross borders. I'm American and originally started my career in the US and I worked mostly in payments and I really was like very very bullish on the future of payments and like my first job was at Discover Card here, you know, and I remember when Discover Card first partnered with PayPal to power merchant support and to be able to pay uh with PayPal and store and you know that was like the hottest thing that was out and this is like 2011. 11 and you know my interest continued to evolve over time and I you

know decided that I wanted to leave the US and actually live and work in another market. So I left the US and moved to Latin America and I lived in Bogotaa for three years and there I was at Uber and you know I supported the Colombia and the Karibbe team. So that's Dominican Republic, Panama, and Puerto Rico. And so that was just a really eye- openening experience. And it taught me how important it is to really be in the markets that you serve so that you can actually know how your customers are using your products, what challenges they face, why your competitors are winning. And so that was just really an invaluable experience. What it also taught me was that, you know, financial systems can be very broken. Sending money to myself in Colombia was really,

really hard. It cost a lot. It took five days. I had to physically go to the bank and sign for my money. Then I had to wait another 24 hours for the money to be released to my account. So it was just a really clunky process. And it just reminded me how my true passion was in payments and in financial services and fintex. And so I said, you know, I went to my mentor and I said, I really love fintex. I really love payments. Like what should I be considering when, you know, I make my next move? Vinnie he said if you really want to learn payments you want to do payments well move to Southeast Asia that's actually where you know people are using and this is before the pandemic people are using QR codes to do payments and people are using crypto and

at the time I had invested in crypto but probably like a lot of Americans you know it's speculative so you just kind of want to see how you hold it um but you're not really thinking about the practical use case of it and how it you know can change everyday lives and so I decided to support a market in southeast theast Asia and the company I worked for was called coins.ph and coins.ph is a crypto exchange and e-wallet and at the time that I worked at coins.ph PH it was an amazing time for crypto right and this was when Philippines was the number one country in the world with NF NFT ownership and this was because people were doing a lot of play to earn and these sort of things being able to earn money because they couldn't go out of their house because of the lockdowns

during the pandemic and so it started to be really really fundamentally clear to me how crypto was super important in changing lives and so at the time I was actually still living in Bogotaa because of the lockdown, I couldn't actually move to the Philippines. And but I was like, again, it's so important to be in the markets that you serve. And so then I I moved here to Southeast Asia and I'm based in Singapore. It's also midnight here for for me. And I decided to join Coinbase. And at Coinbase, I led market expansion and growth across APAC. So my markets were Australia, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong. and you know supporting them through different capacities of our different product offerings. And so after having been

there for a while, I knew that I really wanted to continue my journey in in the web 3 space and I thought, you know, the best way to actually do that well was to actually start my own thing. And so I partnered up with one of the guys I advised, right? So kind of long story short, I launched base, you know, which is, you know, the L2 and I launched base in Africa in Africa in September 2023. And so I met some phenomenal builders building on base and this my co-founder now is is one of those guys. And so I was his adviser for a while. He really helped me understand like how important stable coin wallet infrastructure would be in terms of being able to power

organizations to be able to accept stablecoin payments. And at the time I think while he was convincing me bridge just got acquired by stripe and so you know I'm exraintry which is a competitor of stripe and so I understood how dynamic and powerful it was market movements and so this is the I'll just do the next slide here. I think like you know what was really important for me to understand this year was how important and meaningful stable coins is for the payments ecosystem right you know as this slide says stable coins eight payments last year they process more than Mastercard and Visa combined and so this is super important you know when we think about the role of Ethereum in this you know sort of ecosystem it's the

groundwork of all of the L2s and everyone who's using Ethereum to actually send money abroad and across countries. And so it was really important for me to actually want to be deeply into this space. And so then that allowed me to to start at Block Rider with my co-founder. And so Block Radar, we are wallet infrastructure provider. We like to say that we are the invisible power source for stable coin adoption. And this is a little slide here about how it works. But I think just telling you guys a little bit more so it's practical for you. When you think about fintex, right? Finex serve billions of people around the world, right? and specifically in emerging markets where people have a distrust with banks, right? And so these, you know, fintexs are really trying their very hardest to

figure out how to stay relevant but also how to run more efficiently. And this is where stable coins come in. And so, you know, fintexs like deal or moral pago or again fintech all over the world really are trying to give their customers more optionality. And so this example here on the screen is one of the customers that we have who is trying to be competitive against deal is their competitor and deal today you know supports large enterprises to do payouts to their employees in different countries and so if you think about like the average person in a country like Nigeria you know they might not want to have local fiat naira to have their payments but rather they'd rather have st stable

coins and so this particular customer is wanting to do that. So, they want to be able to allow their customers to be able to take out their earnings that they earn in USD or euro, whatever, you know, currency that's coming from outside of Nigeria and being able to withdraw that in stable coins. So, again, it's it's just really interesting some of the use cases I get to see every day. I'm just again excited for where the market and the space is going. I think there's so much positive momentum and I'm really excited for what you ladies, you know, are building and will build and how you guys will also, you know, add to Ethereum and also stable coin adoption.

So, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Morgan. Personally, I have found blockchain to be a powerful tool for advancing women's financial independence and I have a great deal of respect for all the work that you have put it in this space. I know Coinbase is very helpful to onboard mainstream users. Recently heard about you moving out of Coinbase to a new project. That's great and I wish you all the best for this exciting new chapter. Thank you for joining us here today. Next coming up is a little magic from the coart. It's time for some magic, a surprise moment that has been prepared by our wonderful facilitator. So let's take a few minutes to experience

something creative, joyful. Welcome again Katya. It's 100% wip. Yeah, I would like to create some memories for you for those participants who participated this time. And for this I'm going to share the link with you and if you participated in this cohort please open this link and I'm going to share my screen. So it will be interactive activity about your experience in this cohort. But give me the feedback. Do you see the questions? Can you type in the inputs? Okay. So our first question for you dear fellows, what is cohort 3 for

you? Just in three words try to answer and we will see it on the screen. Okay. opportunity inspiration growth informative discoveries. So, uh yeah, it's so inspiring to see this support. Oh, nice. Growth definitely our participants grew a lot. Sisterhood. Yeah, my sisters, that's true. Okay, thank you very much. Yes, continue answering. Yeah. And we have to have this wonderful word cloud about our cohort challenge. Yeah, it was challenging indeed. I agree with you.

Prospect inspiring. Yeah, for many of you it's inspiration. I hope so. For me, uh protocol is inspiring as well. Super super inspiring. First step into unknown. Yeah, there's so many things to learn about the protocol. Okay, we're moving next. Our next question, yes, you can you can finish this one. And our next question is, what did you like most? Office hours, standups, home assignments, or client issues? That's simple one. Client issues, office hours. Okay. Okay.

Competing client issues. Office hours. Home assignment. Thank you. I thought it would be zero. No one likes standups. Okay. Yes, because you need to do some reports. Agree. Office hours are the best. Of course, it's always interesting to hear from our guests. Okay. For clients issues. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're moving to the next question. Rank your interests in the Ethereum protocol. So, what do you like or more? What are you interested in more? Is it consensus layer or execution layer, EIP or specs and testing? Let's

find out your interests. Consensus layer, EIP, EIP winning. Nope. Consensus layer. Okay. Challenging consensus layer. Oh, execution layer. Nice. What about specs? Yeah, we didn't touch it specs too much. Maybe that's why they are a little bit behind. Consensus layer execution layer. Okay. And the winner is consensus layer, I guess. So, okay. Next question. How many EIPs do we have now?

So, the range is not that much. Try to guess. 1,000. Any other guesses? Ah, I wonder which one is this. I hope we will see correct answer. Unfortunately, we can't see the numbers. I hope this one is correct. The winning one. So, I'm going to announce it. Are you finished? So, the winner is 974 EIPS. Next question.

The most memorable cohort 3 session. This is where we want to hear from you. What was the most excited session? Just your short answer. Was it office hour or maybe ceremony or standup or workshop session? Yeah, that was great. Understanding code bases. Yeah, I guess you mean um transaction life cycle or office hours. Yeah, Potus talk. Potus is a great speaker. Guest quest sessions. Yes, office hours. Office hours lead definitely. Oh, thank you so much for

personally. Office hours. Yeah, I see your interests. That's really important when they share their experiences. They know a lot about the protocol. Office hours. Yes. EIP with Puja. That's great. Get an issue. Guest presentation by Marius. Yes. EPF is also important. So the next question is what's your favorite Git comment? So, we have so many PRs merged. What do you remember? You did it a lot. Many, many times. All these pushes and commits. And

so, what's your favorite? Commit. Push. Pitch. H Yeah. No one likes merge because it's so complicated. Okay. Commit. Push. So thank you for for learning GitHub actively because it's important for open source contributions. You need to know GitHub very very well and commit is leading. Okay, thank you. Yeah, still leading. Three more answers. Fetch.

Fetch is important. You need to update your repos. All right, may we are moving to the next question. Five words about Ethereum protocol. It can be anything. Anything you think of when you hear of Ethereum protocol, consensus, addestation, I don't know transaction, anything. Any anything is which is on your mind that would be interesting to know just first five words you associate with Ethereum. Not necessarily like what Ethereum is, but anything anything you learned on during this cohort world computer that's true vital great

Ethereum is about life your I don't know maybe emotions some technical stuff opensource contributions decentralized that's true open governance yeah Ethereum governance it's something special really really special. It's really it's true decentralized future. Yeah, agree. Absolutely. Community. We have such a nice community in Ethereum. For me, it's the best. Sorry. Other communities. Complicated indeed.

Complicated and fascinated both. E Cler. Yeah, that's boner a little bit, but I hope you will manage it. EIP definitely financial freedom. This is what Morgan had talked about. That's true. Interesting. Yeah, I'm really happy to hear that protocol is interesting for you. Your mission is core development. Yeah, thank you so much. So, this is how Ethereum protocol looks like like for our cohort.

Next question. Will you continue Ethereum protocol contributions? Super easy. I would like to hear from you your true answers even if not but it's on your own but definitely I'm happy with the result. Yeah, not sure. Yeah, because it's really complicated but happy to see that most of our fellows would love to continue and um I hope to see you on our next course. That's it from my side. Thank you very much. I hope you had some fun and thank you for contributing.

Thank you so much indeed. We had a lot of fun and this session was like amazing. I I loved it. It was not only a way to collect feedback what girls think at the end of this cohort but it was also filled of fun. So thank you for adding this. Next we move on to our section where we are going to hear voices from the participants. Let's directly hear what they have to say about this group and uh the journey that they have been through. I'm excited to invite uh Mercy Bulma Knaps. She is EIP reviewer and EPF fellow along with being WIP contributor.

So good afternoon everyone. It's I'm happy being here and then seeing everyone here. Okay. So good afternoon. So I'm here to share a little bit about my journey to Ethereum into Ethereum core development. My name is Miss Naps in Kariba and I'm from Nigeria. And so about me and my journey, my journey started from a different angle because I studied biomedical engineering in school. Then in 2002 I discovered the world of tech and then started building web three applications and I got to participate in two hackathons and then got some grants through projects like women in women in the protocol because the first grant I got was from women who

build web 3. Then out of curiosity I started going into security that was around 2023 ending and I was my focus shifted a little bit because of due to there was a hack that happened and the hack kind of affected me. So I started going into um security for personal reasons. Then I started diving into EVM up codes and low-level program blockchain mechanism. So during that I discovered Ethereum protocol fellowship. I joined them permissionlessly. I was part of the coord 5 as a permissionless fellow. Then the project I worked on was on grinding which is an ethereum concessions client. I worked mainly to I worked a lot in per performance

optimization and security analysis which involved CPU profiling, deep memory analysis and implementing tracing endpoints to monitor what's happening in the client itself during its runtime actually. So I used a lot of tools in my project cuz my project actually kind of like shifted a little bit but it gave me insight and then it made me understood how complex Ethereum can be because Ethereum has so many sub complex components and then during my project I was trying to like do everything at once. That was one mistake I made and then I'm trying to like encourage everyone one of us that we should try to niche down a little bit because trying to know everything in Ethereum is kind

of not possible. So but little by little you're going to build the knowledge and the understanding you need. So my number one mistake was trying to understand everything that happens on the client consensious layer actually which delayed my project and then which made me overwhelmed me in a lot of ways. So but then again the EPF fellows the participants and then everybody in the community the security team and everyone helped me out in so many things. This is the part of the analysis I did during my project. This is some of the graphs we were able to generate on the runtime on of the various consious clients on Ethereum. what I'm currently working on

and my advice I'm currently contributing to rim which is the beam client for um for the beam chain is written in rust and then I I'm currently focused on the networking aspect of ethereum in general and the beacon API implementation and I'm also building a tool to help to help the fossil team to compare slot by slots across community in using the beacon API so that learning I'm contributing because your learning doesn't stop so long as the theorem is concerned because new new EIPs will come up there is new learning there's new research there is new so focusing in a specific area will help you like manage the intimidation and then my second is ask questions that's

why we have communities like women in the term protocol because this is where you ask your questions and you get answers because most of the times I don't feel comfortable with talking to the client delves because sometime they can be intimidating I'm not saying they are intimidating but like seeing your fellow women do things. It's kind of encourages you in a way. So that's why this community is kind of like the first building block I see for any woman that wants to come into Ethereum. And then my final say would be to do your research. There's a lot of research going on Ethereum and there's a lot of things to do in Ethereum. So being good in research in every area and knowing how to ask questions will help you a lot and then

will give you like make you like go ahead so that you don't get stuck and then something you can easily find although a term is not like internet friendly you can't go online and ask have a problem in a term then maybe Google it and get the answer a term has a genesis problem in the sense that sorry that my dog is backing in the sense that any problem you're facing is like is more like a first issue in Ethereum generally you can't go on YouTube and say oh how to do this in Ethereum unless you're deploying spark control but when it comes to core development so using pro using um programs like it magicians and all of that will help you and also reading through EIP and understanding the specs and then knowing how each client team

implements those specifications is really important and so thank you all for listening to my story. I'm really grateful for communities like this. Thank you for everyone that is here and facilitating this. And then I'm excited to keep learning, contributing, and then connecting with everyone here. So, thank you. Thank you so much for your contribution on W EPF participation as well as Ethereum ecosystem and we look forward to have it continued. And with that I would like to next invite Glory. Glory has been a cohort participant for EPF as well as W.

Welcome Glory. Okay. Hello everyone. So I really don't have much on the slide but let me just share it. Hello everyone. Hello beautiful ladies in this court and I'm so excited to be here and be given the opportunity to share my story and um so about me first off I am Glory and I am a mother of two. I usually don't say this often because well I don't really know but I don't say it often but I just feel like saying it right now because I think one way or the other is going to encourage somebody here. um so we don't feel like being a mother stop you from doing some certain things that you really want to do. So

that's why I felt the need to say it. So but basically I started my career that was in 2017 as an Android developer. So I started with mobile development and then I did that for a while. Yeah. So late 2021 I started picking some interest in blockchain and I started that with um more like air drops like crypto air drop. So I was in a crypto air drop where they were just like posting different air drops and I kept on doing those things and I did it for a while and I felt like I was just wasting my time and even wasting this money I had.

So after doing that I I think that was when I actually like discovered Gcoin that was when I discovered Gitcoin. So on Gitcoin back then before they kind of like created a new website for hackathons and bouncing before they had everything on Gcoin. So right there I saw things like bounty hackathons and the lives. So being that I was still new to the whole blockchain space I really didn't know what to do at that point. So I know but when it comes to blockchain I really don't know what to do. So I saw a lot of opportunity but I couldn't really particate. So but I came across Aaron in that process as like they had I think

one of the bounces they had there. Aan was listed there and then they they were looking for people to do some writings for them like technical writing. So I decided to challenge myself with that and then I went into the Auroran developers um platform started learning about Aguran I started writing some tutorials about Agoran and how to build apps on like build mobile apps on Agorand. So because being that I came from a mobile background I at first it was kind of challenging because when I checked the platform I saw that a lot of the tutorials they had there were mostly web related and all that. So very few tutorials at some point too it was more

like an advantage too because it was an opportunity being that very few resources was available when it comes to like developing mobile applications that interact with the blockchain. So I started doing some tutorials like doing some writeups and getting paid for that. I was learning and I was getting paid. So that was one beautiful thing about blockchain. So after that I found out about K. So I joined the can sorry four K block for so um that was in 2021 like towards the end of 2021 state. Yeah. So I think because like last time for two months yeah so during the course I had

the opportunity to to team up with some ladies called s the s I don't know if we know them. So I was one of the people working with the team. So being that I was still new at that point. So I was just like okay I decided to like because I really wanted to contribute to that project and I felt like okay what can I do? I can easily learn front end development even though I didn't really know front end that much as at that time. So I said okay let me learn front end so that I can contribute to what the smen were building. So I learned how to do react and yeah react typescript and all that right on the project and like in fact I did most of the work on the

front end for that project despite the fact I was learning so and then we had the opportunity to launch our uh what's it called our NFC and lucky for us we were able to sell everything I think if you I don't know what's showing on my my image I don't know if is my what's it called anyways let me just continue so my avatar if you see my avatar there that's my that's my PSP for search so yeah after that and um I dived into cello did some okay so before going into cello I had the opportunity to work with an based projects that they were doing stuff building um defi related

applications on a so I was writing front end and some background in Py smart contract back then and then I figured I can be in this space without knowing anything about Ethereum or solidity and all that. So I decided to start learning about solidity. So while I was I had the opportunity of doing that with Cello. So I was learning about solidity, how to write solidity, smart contracts, how to interact with apps and all that. And I was doing that with Cello and good enough again like I said I was learning I getting paid. So I was writing tutorials and I was also getting paid

for writing those tutorials like how to like different different ideas that just come to my mind. I just write it like tutorial like how to use so and so to in to build so and so on the cell platform and all that. So after that, I think last year. Yes. So last year after the Ethereum frontier program that they did at Kenya, uh that was where I started like picking interest in Ethereum protocol because I they they created a a telegram group where they were giving they mention a lot of things about protocol. So unfortunately for me for the what's it called for the serial frontier program I arrived there very

late because the flight arrived late so I got there when the program was almost over all I was able to do was just snap picture and just interact with some few persons but later on when I went on to the telegram I saw some of the conversations some of the sessions that he had and then I started picking interest in protocol. So later on during the year I saw a post where they say called EPF experience possible fellowship was out. So I decided to give it a shot. So I applied. Yeah. So unfortunately I didn't get in but because I was interested in learning more about the protocol I decided to still go ahead and be part of it. So

good enough they have the permissionless option. So I took that opportunity to like go into this thing. I say okay I really want to learn this. I really want to know more about the protocol. So on on joining the fellowship as then I didn't know about um women protocol. It was in the course of the fellowship that I found out about the protocol. Thanks to Messi I think she was the one that mentioned it to me. So that was like um maybe like two or 3 months into the principle fellowship. So I was contributing to the fellowship and also contributing to some issues while participating on the women in particular last year. And um so what I discovered

in the process was like I kept saying I even did a video about it like if I had known about women Ethereum protocol fellowship things would have been much more easier for me while in the protocol itself like the protocol fellowship because a lot of things we do here in the women protocol fellowship we are something similar to what we are doing at the main fellowship. So I just felt like had that knowledge or that information about the women program and gotten that understanding. Even the study group mostly the study group and the women protocol if you have the opportunity like participate in those two program I bet you joining the fellowship is not really going to be

much of an issue as if you are actively involved all the learnings and contributing both for the study group and in the women fellowship. So because during the fellowship at some point I felt like the dullest person in the room like because it was so like I'm still like trying to find my way around things. Why people were already speaking big grammar like they already saying things that I really didn't really understand and then it's like some persons were already like far like far gone in their project while I'm still trying to figure out what I really want to do. So yeah, I think there was a time in the office hour or stand where I said

I'm confused like I don't know what to do. So but yeah later on because you know in that idea right now for those of you have gone to check the idea it's very few right now. So but during the time I was checking like going through the ideas there were a lot of them and I even like went back and forth went to the old ones like the previous course the new the the current score. So I was checking and checking and I was still like finding it very difficult to come to a conclusion as to which one I want to work on. So at some point I was having difficulty like deciding on what I want to work on and then later on I figured okay let me just work on this.

So that was how I ended up working on um integrating native support for ephemery on clients. So I discovered that there are some client I have native support for ephemery. So I decided to like okay so I spoke with Mario who was one of the mentors for ephemery and then he suggested I I should start with t and bessu. So that was how I started working on Bessu to implement the native support and good enough we got to the point where we can be able to do stuff like and t-mory if you want to run an ephemery test net or on the embesso or t clients so any of them so you can do that natively before now you needed to do a lot of things like writing some custom

code or downloading genesis file and doing all of that so to really for better user experience and to relieve users of that stress we needed to like implement it natively into clients. So in wrapping up so what I'm working on currently I'm still like trying to complete what I started on Bessu we had what we call the reset feature of ine so that's part of what I'm still working on and then also like currently I'm also like trying to refactor some of the implementation I did before on tech the way I was handling things previously though they are working but I want to do some refactoring and then still also looking to implement native support for some other clients that FMY doesn't that

doesn't that doesn't support Ephre at the moment and then I'm also working towards becoming an FMY validator and I'm also exploring EIP7701 which is a native account abstraction I had a discussion with some of the the A8 recently and they needed like native support for best as it is now after my discussion with S it looks like that might not be happening right now because of the current standpoint for EO Faka and all of that. So yeah, I think that's pretty much it. My advice for everyone to wrap is especially for our ladies here that are in the court and looking to join EPF to continue their journey from here. So my advice

would be for you to just continue just be consistent. It can be tiring. It can be exhausting. Sometimes you feel like you want to give up or if you know what you want to achieve and what you really want to do, you just have to keep going. And then if you have any issue just like um me said be open don't be shy be free to ask ask your questions in public because sometimes when you DM people they don't respond quickly but when you mention them on the group or on the main discord they tend to respond more quickly so you should also try to do that and do your research because people like Mar will tell you don't go and disturb any mentor so do a lot of research on your own do a lot of research Like just when you feel like

you you're out of the point that you can't do it at all again that's when you feel like okay that's when you go and like post it okay I'm having this issue I need support and all that just keep going it's very interesting to see that uh to see what you have done and to see that this is useful to people this is useful to the community and people are using it and yeah thank you very much for having me thank you glory for all the work you are putting in Ethereum ecosystem I loved the hearing of involvement with EIP. As you mentioned, EIP7701 may or may not be a part of Ethereum mainet, but I'm happy to see the girls from this cohort are actually trying to make contribution and help uh proposals get like explode and get to

the Ethereum mainet and you have shared a lot of good advices. Hopefully, coart people will follow them and enjoy the time being a participant here. Thank you so much for your nice words. We have one more guest cohort participant. I would like to invite Arunima Chadri who is a researcher and MIGA labs collaborator. She also participated in WIP cohort 3. Aruna. Yeah. So hello everyone. My name is Aimad Shri and I don't know why this Y came and yeah so I have been a researcher at status.ini I for the past

one year and recently I've also started working on a project with Malabs and for this course I was fellow for the women in Ethereum protocol fellowship. So starting a bit about me. So I'm a freelance researcher. I was doing research work on the Ethereum with status. Along with my masters and I have been a part of this uh permanent protocol collection and considering the research work my background includes like I've been researching sampling. Yeah. So peer-to-peer networks and I have also worked on blockchain development a bit doing a bit of side projects and personal projects. Apart from that I am

a master student and I love traveling reading books and shopping. Moving on. So the previous projects that I worked on include data agility sampling simulator which was built in Python which we used to analyze various star concepts. Currently I am working on a Ethereum node discovery crawler using the disk V5 protocol and this is the project by Malab that I am working on and I have been a part of Codex research for more than one year now and conducted multiple research experiments as a part of the research team also we got a research paper published so yeah and currently I'm also analyzing the Zatu data set that was made open source by

the e panda hops team. So I'm looking into that. Moving on about the fellowship experience, the best part was meeting so many women from the Ethereum protocol who are working on building the future of Ethereum and uh although it was a bit late but still I tried to make the best out of it. The best part which I felt was the session on which we were taught to go through the code bases. So previously I was just reading research papers and conducting experiments on systems. But this session actually inspired me to go through the code bases and learn and see how things are working and it helped me relating the theory knowledge with how you've implemented in

the client and I also love the session on EIP and their implications. So after that I started going through a lot of EIP. So that was really inspiring and really looking forward to participate in the next cohort. So yeah, thank you. That's about me. Thank you so much Aronima and really appreciate your contribution. I think you have been contributing at like real protocol level where you are actually interacting with node crawlers and things like that. Again working and trying to implement EIPs are good steps for people who really want to get involved in protocol development. But there are other venues where people can find ways to contribute. Thank you so much for being the participant here and we look forward

to see you in the next cohort. Now is the time to celebrate. I would like to invite Katya to highlight the standout contributors and honor those who made this cohort extra special. Moving on to the section awards. Yeah, thank you Puja. I will be short. So we would like to make this cohort memorable for you and we prepared a po. So to get this po you need to be active during the cohort. So you need to work on at least five home assignments. So that means you should be in our progress table with an issue and one update on this issue. You need to be assigned to

this issue. Or another way to get the POP is to write about EIP. We had this task during the cohort. So you need to write about one EIP, some short article that also works. You will get the link by email. The participants who did all these tasks, they will get the link by email. In case I mean maybe it will take maybe two or three days. Those who didn't get um any email but you still think you did all these tasks, please tag me in the Discord because probably I just need something. Sorry about it. And

here are our participants. Let's just welcome them. Please share your images, your reactions. Um, Alexandra, Arunima, Esley Barakott Ratipa Cheriel Dina Darin Glory AJ Lori Praise Juliet Olivia Coco Lada Louisa Maria Mercy Naomi Adinga Rose Sylvia Tracy, and Victoria. Thank you so much, ladies. And I would like to say thank you to those who has already merged PRs. It's Victoria, Sylvia, Mercy, and Lada. Thank you so much. And for those of you who

has already opened PRs, please continue working on them and join our next cohorts. And uh please share your feedback with us because it's important. We are working uh on our cohorts to make them better. We work on our cohorts and we try to make them better from cohort to cohort. So your feedback is really really important for us. Thank you so much. The link to the feedback form is in the chat. You are welcome to take a look and please please please provide us your feedback because that would help us improve the next cohort curriculum and also how we can encourage more women to be a part of this. Moving forward we are

towards the end and closure of this session here today. But before we wrap up, I'm happy to welcome Latana again who will make some announcements of grants and supports provided by WIP team. She would also give us a glimpse of what's coming um next for WE including the upcoming event at ETCC. Ladonna, welcome back. Wow, what an amazing session this was. I am just ecstatic. I really want to shout out Glory. Lori, thank you so much for sharing that you are a mother of two. I know that is not easy to share, but I'm glad that you feel safe here at WIP to share that. And that's what this is all

about is creating a safe environment for women to strive and and reach their goals and also for us to identify the unique needs of the women that are participating and trying to move forward in this ecosystem. So, Glory, thank you for that. Going forward, cohort number four, we will be discussing this and uh like Katcha said, figuring out how we can improve the program, the process. If you are interested in being a facilitator, feel free to to reach out to Pua, myself, Katcha. Each person brings something unique to this opportunity. We don't own WIP. We want WIP to be owned and moved forward by the entire community of women. So I think

everyone has a unique experience that they can offer to WIP the work study and also make suggestions on where we should be what should we be doing what is actually needed for us to identify other areas for us to open up the ecosystem and make it more diverse. What's coming up next? I am so excited about our WIP brunch happening in Canes um alongside of ECC that will be held on June 28th. We have an amazing location, amazing venue just to celebrate women, celebrate uh the women who have gone through cohorts one, two, and three, but also to create a space for us to network, bring more women in, and also to just have a a

safe space for women to come and have great brunch together and make new friends. So, really excited about that. WIP will be offering travel scholarships and grants for attendance at our brunch at ECC. So please look out in the discord. The applications will go out next week. And so we want to make sure that we are capturing individuals unique needs. So whether it's, you know, help with visa applications, flights, accommodations, child care, whatever your unique situation is, we want to make sure that we can support you in your journey because that's what WIP is here for. So look out for those applications. We will also be hosting an event at Dev Connect this year and uh we

will be looking for a lot of feedback on what that should look like um what will have the most impact and how we can work as an entire team to create a unique opportunity um at Dev Connect. So again this has been such an amazing session and I just want to thank everyone for participating. Everyone's contribution is so meaningful to the direction of WIP. So the attendees, the organizers, the facilitators, we all make this worthwhile. So thank you again for participating. Thank you Ladina for sharing all this information. I'm sure the support that is offered here would help more participants to join us live.

We have been meeting with each other on Zoom calls. It would be really nice and lovely to see you oneonone. So please make your effort from your end. We will try to do our best to support you. Well, it's time to wrap up. Thank you again everyone, every single one of you who have made this cohort a success. Your contribution with PRs, your contributions with participation in question answer session of the guest lectures or just learning has been incredible. On behalf of the entire WIP team and EC institute, we are so proud to have you here today. So let's keep this network growing and showing the world of inclusion that protocol layers looks like. I would like to congratulate

all cohort 3 participants and supporters. See you all in cohort 4. Thank you ladies. See you around.