Christian Deciga is a blockchain entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, California. He is on the founding team of Everipedia, the first decentralized encyclopedia where editors are paid for their contributions in the site’s native cryptocurrency called IQ. Christian’s passion is in the intersection of technology and social impact. When he is not working on building the crypto Wikipedia and knowledge economy of the Web 3.0, He likes to make people dance in his free time as Dj Christ Christ.
How did you get started and what or who inspired and empowered you to?
I first got into the tech industry, back when I was a college student at California State University, San Bernardino in October 2015. I was at a tech talk where Mahbod Moghadam (founder of Genius) and Sam Kazemian (Persian Zuck) were presenting Everipedia at Cal Poly Pomona. At the end of their talk, I saw the vision, a pillar on the internet where anyone can get paid for helping others by sharing their knowledge and much more. That quarter, I did not sign up for classes to return the following year. I dropped out and decided to move in to the Everipedia hacker house in Westwood, Los Angeles and join as a founding member and work on the project full time.
What unique and creative strategies if any did you use when you were first getting started?
When I joined, the site was in its early infancy, I remember seeing only 20 people at a time on the actual site. I used growth hacking to help bring in more users to the site. In fact this is how I got my Dj name name haha, “Christian Christ”. Mahbod would always call me that when the site would drastically increase to over 1000 people on Google analytics.. He would always say I make the site “blow up”. I eventually helped grow overall traffic to over 5 million monthly unique visitors.I did this by looking at trending news topics, and make the Everipedia articles that Wikipedia did not cover. This helped Everipedia with search engine optimization. We would win search terms on Google that would land people to Everipedia articles instead of Wikipedia. I wore a journalist hat, I was very quick at discovering the names of people that national media outlets were looking for that they would later link to in their stories.
By utilizing social media, I would promote the Everipedia articles on Facebook and Twitter where they would go viral, making the site traffic increase dramatically exposing us to new contributors and investors. We were even hit up for potential investment by the founder of Youtube, Jawed Karim!
Can you tell me about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
Everipedia! Not only are we building a decentralized encyclopedia where you earn crypto for making scholarly entries about anything you like, but a foundation for a real world knowledge economy built on top of IQ! We have plans to launch the crypto version of Quora called IQ&A and a prediction market using IQ. Imagine you go anywhere on the internet, Wikipedia, Facebook, Stackoverflow, Genius, if you contribute valuable information you earn “IQ”. IQ is worth money but it is also a sign of how smart you are. This is what we are building at Everipedia. Join us!!
What are the things that most excite you about blockchain and crypto?
A lot of cool projects are being built right now.