Superteam Turkey Member Spotlight
Demir -an economics backgrounded web3 lover - co-founded one of the most exciting projects in the Solana Ecosystem with the great Hub3 team and was granted $12.000 by Superteam Turkey.
About Demir
Demir was a young Turkish majoring in economics at university. He was among hundreds of thousands of students wishing to do something disruptive and level up his game. He believed the world is changing, but traditional finance's old and slow mechanisms need reforms. But then, he saw blockchain and wondered what was behind this technology. So he started to learn about blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and token economy. While learning about blockchain technology, he understood the true vision of Satoshi Nakamoto and stood anonymous.
After his learning phase, he decided to become a web3 native and used his knowledge to contribute to the ecosystem. Since he was not a technical person, he wanted to contribute with his social skills. So, in 2021, he started as an Alpha which is a kind of web3 researcher for special communities to share important news to find the best opportunities. Then, he recognized most of the web3 projects still facing problems connecting with the community. That was the point when he started working as Discord Moderator for an NFT project and helped build a community from scratch. He was so successful in building communities that he began to climb the stairs of his career as a community manager, public speaker, and marketing specialist.
While climbing the ladder, he met with reputable ecosystem actors and started having advisory roles over many web3 projects, especially for their strategy planning but still, he thought that there were some deficiencies in the ecosystem. In this process, he started to meet his teammates, one by one, with whom he would work in the future. They knew what was missing in the ecosystem and had the right connections, so they felt they could do more and build their project. Since they were great at meeting people and building communities, they wanted to automate this process and let everyone meet with brilliant people in a decentralized ecosystem. That’s where he and his team started building Hub3 in 2023 with the people they met on the road.
Hub3 was live after months of hard work, and finally, he found the fastest, cheapest, and most thriving network, Solana. But there were some missing parts for Hub3: capital and lack of partnerships. Demir describes this process as one of the biggest challenges in web3 and adds, “ Although it has a futuristic freedom for most, there are many limitations in web3. In this adventure, we faced monopolistic organizations in the web3 space. It is so hard to connect with project teams if you are new or have insufficient funds to join NFT communities to connect. Sometimes, even your wealth is insufficient to reach the network you need. However, some organizations and DAOs can help you expand your network without any barrier”. Therefore, Demir started to search for a greater community in the Solana ecosystem. After weeks of detailed research, he found the “Superteam Turkey”.
Demir and Superteam Turkey
2023 brought a lot of new adventures to Demir as he started building Hub3 on Solana Network with the brilliant people he met through web3. Demir describes Hub3 as “Hub3 is a decentralized platform that connects web3 people based on demographics and interests. With Hub3, users can engage and share information, experience, and knowledge in blockchain, NFTs, crypto, friendships, and more.”
As mentioned before, while developing Hub3, his road crossed with Superteam Turkey at Solana Hacker House Istanbul. Meeting with Superteam Turkey boosted his knowledge, community, and motivation. He explains his experience with Superteam Turkey “Thanks to Superteam, we could reach direct contact with Solana Foundation and legit network areas since they aim to support builders in Solana. Superteam Turkey told us about the grant opportunities, I trusted our project, but we knew how difficult it was to find capital and didn’t know how to process further. But, they did encourage us to apply for an Instagrant after a short meeting for Hub3. It was the time we understood that Superteam Turkey was helping value-creating projects in its first steps. ” Superteam Turkey was the key to Hub3’s success which helped the team to develop their minimum viable product (MVP) with a $5,000 Instagrant, and they become Superteam Turkey members. Success brings more success, so they have decided to apply for Grizzlython.
Demir created his project and gathered a community of 60,000 active users, but his mission wasn’t done. He truly wanted to build a decentralized, personalized connection platform, but there was a missing point, and the team started researching it. Demir began to explore how to create an actual decentralized communication tool, and it was hours before the Solana Mini Hackathon in Turkey. The team created this tool in less than 10 hours and named it MailX. MailX is a communication tool that is decentralized, secure, fast, offers cheap transaction fees thanks to Solana, and has a customized domain infrastructure. MailX won a $1,000 award in Solana Mini Hackathon and was selected as #1 at Demo Day at Solana Crossroads.
After continuous development, they saw an opportunity to make their project multichain. Superteam Turkey helped MailX apply for Wormhole’s Cross-Chain Ecosystem Fund and received $7,000 for the development of MailX.
Everything was going well, the team was happy, and the project was developing each day, but the taste of success was sweet, and Demir and his team wanted to grow and adapt more users to their product. However, as every success brings the euphoria of victory, Demir and his team didn’t want to stop building and growing. Therefore, they have submitted Hub3 to the Solana Acceleration program, opening doors to great networks and mentoring.
Why it matters
As we look behind and see how successful has Demir and his projects become with Superteam Turkey and Solana Foundation, we feel proud of what he has accomplished. Demir is an excellent example of how a non-developer can successfully work and build in the web3 ecosystem.
If you want to know more about how to become a Superteam Member and meet with some of the most extraordinary people in web3 and Solana Ecosystem, join us!