While pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science at California State University, San Bernardino in October 2015, Christian Deciga attended a tech talk that was being presented by Mahbod Moghadam and Sam Kazemian, the founders of Everipedia at Cal Poly Pomona. It would be at this presentation where he stepped his foot into the doors to his entrepreneurship. In December of 2015, instead of continuing his traditional college education, Christian dropped out to become a founding member of Everipedia and work full time on the project at the company’s first headquarters (PH 2 at 972 Hilgard Ave. on UCLA campus) in Westwood, Los Angeles.

With the help of clever tactics, viral social media campaigns with no paid marketing, and more, Christian was able to help Everipedia reach greater heights. In fact, in 2017, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Dr. Larry Sanger, joined their team as Chief Information Officer. This move helped legitimize their start-up and boost their reputation further. Every tactic that Deciga used to help the platform gain more traffic seemed to work, prompting Mahbod to nickname him “Christian Christ.” Detailed Everipedia articles were being shared organically by users on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, blogging sites, and even being cited in news publications such as The New York Times in 2016 during President Trump’s presidential campaign.

Everipedia got its first big break when in February of 2018, they were able to procure a venture funding of 30 million from the Galaxy Digital Fund founded by Michael Novogratz. Now, Everipedia has the opportunity to start a new era and become a part of Web 3.0, where dApps take over the reign and give power to the user.

However, the road up until here has not been smooth for them. Everipedia saw its first ray of hope when Mahbod Moghadam, co-founder of Genius joined the team after Sam Kazemian showed him his Everipedia page at a talk at UCLA in early 2015. But, until Deciga joined them later in the same year, the team was not able to drive traffic to their website and was having poor luck showing their investors anything worthwhile. With the help of Deciga, the team was finally able to show spikes in traffic to their investors. In spite of this, it seemed as though no one was willing to spend their money on this project. The team was even contacted by the co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, who seemed interested at first, but pulled out at the last minute.

Now that the team has been able to prove to their investors that their project is worth the effort, it is time to know what Everipedia is about. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, stated in July 2008 “There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.” Well, according to Christian Deciga, Everipedia is the more open alternative to Wikipedia that Graham requested be built in his “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” blog in July of 2008. On Everipedia, editors are incentivized to edit/create articles and make them more accurate. For their contributions, editors are rewarded with Everipedia’s cryptocurrency, which is known as the IQ token.

Everipedia is a decentralized platform built on the EOS.IO blockchain, and the team behind it aims to build more decentralized apps like it. Everipedia’s mission is based on knowledge and DeFi (PredIQt). Since moving to a blockchain platform, Everipedia is now part of a family of dApps utilizing the IQ token. The Everipedia team wants to provide the world with knowledge in the form of decentralized apps or dApps. The latest dApp released on the IQ network is an easy to use prediction market called PredIQt. The knowledge market allows users to purchase and trade shares in the outcomes of future events.Users can earn money by correctly predicting whether or not any given event actually happens.In addition to powering a decentralized global encyclopedia, the IQ token now also powers knowledge markets and the additional DeFi applications that will be built into PredIQt.

You can find Christian Deciga on his Instagram account (@christiandeciga)