I've been thinking about how I ended up working in the crypto space, and the pivotal role that @ethereumfndn played without even realizing it When I was 12, I bought Bitcoin before I had a bank account. I traded a birthday gift card for BTC on LocalBitcoins (an old p2p market) to buy a VPN and pirate video games. I didn’t have language for it then, but it was my first experience with any sort of internet financial system I otherwise couldn’t access as a 12-year-old. In college, I founded our university’s blockchain club. The EF was one of our first supporters, with a small grant to host a Merge celebration. We invited @preston_vanloon to speak, bought way too much Chick-fil-A, and earned the club legitimacy and momentum. Soon after, I was selected for the EF’s Devcon Scholars Program and traveled solo for the first time to Bogotá for Devcon. I met people who I keep in touch with to this day. Two years later, when scoping the topic for my Master’s Thesis, there was no better place for me to turn than the Ethereum Foundation, who was conveniently looking for applicants to its Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. I applied, was accepted, and spent the next 12 months digging into single slot finality, learned more about consensus mechanisms than I ever thought possible, and still didn’t scratch the surface of all the amazing work that the Consensus R&D team continues to do. I’m convinced I wouldn’t have gotten hired at Coinbase without the EF opening doors and providing opportunities, and I know many others across the industry who'd say the same thing