We are excited to announce the first edition of our Community Spotlight blog series! The growth of 0x over the past year would have not been possible without our passionate and talented global community who has supported us at every step of this amazing journey. So, we wanted to recognize the superstar developers and enthusiasts within the 0x community. We hope that you’ll enjoy getting to know them and share in our appreciation for everything that they’ve done to advance our mission.

The first highlighted community member should be no stranger to anyone who has ever visited our official sub-Reddit or Rocket.Chat. Adam, who goes by “Polezo” online, is an active moderator on both platforms, as well as a valued Community Ambassador. He has done a great job keeping conversations civil and productive. We thank Adam for his dedication, and hope you enjoy the interview below!

Can you please share a little bit about yourself and your background?

Sure. Well, I’m originally from Nashville [Tennessee]. I moved to [Washington] DC after getting my undergrad degree. I really thought I wanted to get into law or politics and that’s why I came here originally. I ended up working a few years as a paralegal at Steptoe and Johnson to that end; they are a fairly large corporate law firm. They’re actually pretty big into blockchain too… one of the first big law firms to join the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance.



Anyway, I loved the people at Steptoe but nothing about the work grabbed me, so I left to pursue my MBA in digital media management. My ultimate goal was to work in digital media and for the public good. After graduating, I got my start doing just that in public health, doing community and social media management for the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and for NIH (National Institutes of Health) via a firm called Westat. Westat is a big research firm in Maryland that also does a lot of great work in Health Communications.



In 2015 I joined AARP to work on their brain health product, Staying Sharp, which has been pretty exciting. We take an evidence-based approach to brain health that emphasizes exercise, good nutrition, and other activities that are proven to help the brain. Like other brain health platforms, we also have some brain games, of course. The fact that brain games don’t really do much for your brain health is relatively common knowledge these days. However, you still need to have brain games on your platform because the search volume of brain games compared to brain health is like 10–100x. So, I help manage these games and other pieces of content on the platform, as well as work on building new games and activities. I also do some SEO, marketing, community, and communications work for the platform… I guess I wear a lot of hats in my day job.



On the side, I write, do some video and web production work, including some freelance work with the 0x Relayer DDEX. And, of course, you’ll also frequently see me hanging out in Ethereum and 0x-related forums like Reddit, Twitter, and Rocket.Chat, just generally geeking out over all the cool stuff you can already do in Web3.

How did you discover blockchain?

I don’t even really know if I could answer that question. I think I got interested in it early last summer. Like most people in the space, I was originally looking at it as an investment vehicle. I was like, “This is not going away. It’s clear that there are some important things going on here.” And then I started learning about Ethereum and what you could do with Ethereum. And once you go down that rabbit hole, it’s hard to get back out. So, I really started going deeper and deeper in, and then just found that it was something I’m really passionate about. There are just so many different new applications that were effectively impossible to build before blockchain-based smart contracts. It’s been a very fun and fascinating world to get into. I’m not sure if the legacy of public blockchains has been a net positive for the world yet, but I definitely believe it has the potential to improve our way of life in the long-term.

With so many blockchain projects around, what attracted you to 0x?

Well, the token sale happened around the same time I was falling down the rabbit hole in Ethereum. What attracted me was just seeing people talking about it, but then what really kept me there was when I started to realize how you could really connect so many pieces in Web3 together with 0x. I think that token swap is such a fundamental feature for Web3 to be successful that you really need to have a widely adopted, open-source standard infrastructure like 0x to enable it. I do think that there are a lot of other great DEX protocols and token swap projects out there, but there’s nothing quite as flexible, open and low friction as 0x. I think that’s a big part of why we’ve seen it grow as fast as it has.

What blockchain use case(s) are you most excited about?

At a high level, decentralized finance, gaming, and distributed cloud computing are my big three. There’s absolutely a lot of dumb stuff blockchain is shoehorned into — and who knows how this experiment will work out in the end — but I do have high confidence in decentralized finance and gaming in particular. Blockchain-based smart contracts already enable entirely new types of ecosystems with very tangible advantages in these areas. Distributed computing platforms have a bit more of an uphill battle in many ways, but over the long-term, I do think projects like Golem and FileCoin could be disruptive to big cloud service providers as well.

What’s it like being a 0x Reddit moderator?

It’s mostly the same as it is to moderate any other forum. You have to be active because there’s so much damn speculation in this space, and a lot of discussion veers into price talk and/or isn’t really productive for moving the technology forward. But, it is great finding the genuine discussion you’re excited about, [of] which there’s plenty of exciting things going on in the 0x space… and then just chatting about them. That’s the only reason I do it, is because I enjoy it, right? I’m genuinely passionate about all the DeFi work that’s going on and excited about what else people can build with 0x as time goes on.

Are you doing anything else within the blockchain community?

I’m doing some light freelance content development and community management for DDEX. I am also working on my own project that won’t necessarily use 0x, but probably will. And I’m on the [0x Rocket.Chat] chat a lot as well, and I make some contributions on GitHub for the wiki — I recently redid the entire community section of the wiki.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

I enjoy making things… many hobbyist projects that I don’t always finish, but it’s fun to poke around. I have a 3D printer and I’ll sometimes sculpt in Oculus Medium or some other VR sculpting programs and then print it out from my printer. I think that it’s really fascinating… taking an object that you created within an entirely VR and then making it into something tangible in real life. So I’ll 3D print toys for my kid and gift other VR art as presents for loved ones.

AR and VR, in general, are both my passions as well. I made a VR game I can play with my dog that’s pretty fun. [Over the] next ten years we’re going to see some crazy things come out that incorporate AR/VR + Web3, and the lines between real objects and digital objects are going to become blurrier and blurrier.