PANAJ Last year, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic’s first wave, Barnbolim based school student Gajesh Naik began creating online educational content. The content was meant to help primary school students from vernacular schools to cope with the lack of physical classes
This year, 13-year-old Gajesh has outdone himself.
The Class Vill student of People’s High School, Panaji, is now the creator of PolyCaj, a cryptocurrency money managing ecosystem Gajesh has developed two dapps or decentralised applications on the Polygon network, which provide access to crypto-investing
Polycaj is a one-stop Defi (decentralized finance) and NFT platform, while StableGaj is a decentralized stablecoin swap providing stablecoin exchange on the Polygon network.
While children his age were busy coming to terms with online learning during the pandemic, Gajesh used the time to upskill himself mastering chatbot development to blockchain technology applications.
PolyGaj is a DeFi protocol built on the Polygon blockchain, which has now managed $7 million in cryptocurrency, including a recent investment in Polygon blockchain by the US billionaire Mark Cuban.
DeFi is an umbrella term for non-custodial software programs that handle one’s cryptocurrency for them, without intermediaries like banking systems or investment managers.
“Since the last one year, when physical classes were discontinued due to the pandemic, I decided to take and completed some online certificate courses, including from University at Buffalo, State University of New York,” said Gajesh, the son of Goa civil service officer Siddhivinayak and PWD official Pranita.
Gajesh began learning coding at the age of eight at a bootcamp, and today knows C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Solidity.
He said his interest in blockchain technology was kindled when he attended convincing lectures at the international blockchain congress held at Goa in 2018, organized in collaboration with the Goa government.
“Since then he equipped himself with requisite blockchain programming skills and blockchain programming languages. Being a relatively newer topic with less knowledge availability in the public domain, Cajesh takes direct tutelage from professors of MIT and Stanford,” said his father Siddhivinayak
Today, he actively participates on social media platforms in discussions on cryptocurrency and has gained 22,100 followers on Twitter, among them Dimitry Beterin (father of Vitalik Buterin, founder of ethereum), Sandeep Nailwal (co Founder of Polygon), Jaynti Kanani (CEO of Polygon), and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder of Paytm), among others
He has also recorded explanatory videos about crypto for his YouTube channel, which now has over 12,000 subscribers from across the globe
Gajesh is the youngest known person to have completed all five levels of the gruelling Google Foobar challenge
As online classes have resumed, the teenager plans to dedicate up to five hours to school work, utilising the other free time during his day working on PolyGaj.
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