Blockcast.cc: Good day everyone. It is our weekly interview session again with crypto and blockchain professional. Hi Jager, tell us more about yourself please.
Jager: Thanks Jenny. My name is James Jager, however, I’ve always gone by Jager among friends and colleagues.
I’ve been aware of Bitcoin since 2014 and active in the Cryptocurrency space since mid-2017. I remember discovering Bitcoin when I was in my teens and trying to (unsuccessfully) explain Bitcoin to my parents at the time.
When I became active in the Crypto space, I was working in a completely unrelated field and volunteering for Binance in my spare time as one of their Binance Angels. While volunteering as a Binance Angel, I contributed hours each day engaging with the Binance community in our various user groups, helping resolve issues, and exploring Binance’s technology together. I became very close with a number of members of the Binance team.
Back in the early days, CZ would be interacting every day with the community in the chatrooms and he would encourage all employees of Binance to do the same.
It was around December 2017 when I received a job offer from CZ to join as their community manager. I accepted the offer and joined Binance without a second thought. Being a part of Binance since its beginning has been a thrilling and thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Six months after I joined Binance, I transitioned from Community Manager to become the Project Manager of Binance Academy and began putting together a team to build a product that would revolutionize crypto and blockchain education.
Blockcast.cc: Tell us more about Binance Academy. What are your mission and vision?
Jager: Advertising, misinformation, and manipulation through strategies like FUD are fairly rampant in the still-nascent crypto world. From my perspective as an enthusiastic learner, it’s highly important to be able to have an entirely neutral platform to be able to obtain knowledge from without being concerned about whether the content is written with alternative motives in mind.
Binance Academy has been built as a non-profit venture. We don’t advertise and we don’t accept sponsorships. Our goal is to provide easy-to-understand, entirely neutral, and unbiased educational material to everyone around the world who want to learn more about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and we offer our content in 17 languages.
Blockcast.cc: How do you see Binance Academy help the crypto and blockchain community?
Jager: Over the span of almost two years, Binance Academy has become the most reliable and comprehensive knowledge base for education around Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Trading.
The Binance Academy team is extremely passionate about our goal for educating the world and we continue to work hard to achieve this goal.
Because of COVID19, many activities went online, did this help with work at the academy?
The Binance Academy team is actually highly distributed. We’re a small team of 10 people and we are distributed across 7 different countries. Our priority has always been hiring for talent rather than hiring for location.
COVID19 did not affect our working productivity negatively, if anything it helped us increase our productivity as we knew there would be many people in quarantine trying to find new things to learn and we wanted to provide educational material for those people.
Blockcast.cc: Do you intend to give out a certified cert and degree in the later stage?
Jager: We certainly do. It’s in our long-term road map. We want to be able to provide blockchain- verifiable certificates and badges to anyone who completes our courses. In fact, we’ve already created content for one course, we are currently working on the technical solution to be able to deliver this to users. We experimented with other solutions earlier in the year and will reassess these more once we complete our near-term goals.
Blockcast.cc: Can you share with us the 3 most important things to look out for in this crypto space? You can tell us specific trends, coins, or even things to be careful of.
Jager: There are many malicious actors in the cryptocurrency space due to the pseudonymous nature of cryptocurrencies. This can be dangerous for users new to the industry, so it’s extremely important to understand the most common cryptocurrency scams and how you can avoid them.
Trading cryptocurrencies is a high-risk activity. It’s important to understand risk management before starting your journey as a day trader. It’s also important to understand the common mistakes in Technical Analysis if you’re looking to get into trading.
The last one is the most simple one: Don’t fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect (a cognitive bias in which a person will drastically overestimate their skill). It can be detrimental to overestimate your knowledge when you’re investing your finances into a very volatile industry.
Blockcast.cc: How do you envision blockchain and crypto in 2030?
Jager: I’m not big on predictions, I personally rarely have time to look at markets anymore. I do believe that, without a doubt, blockchain will have been adopted by most relevant industries in 2030. Blockchain is a complete game-changer for many industries and increasingly more companies are rushing to integrate blockchain into their current systems.
Cryptocurrency is a tough one. Do I believe cryptocurrency will still be around in 2030? Definitely. I think the most important question would be which cryptocurrencies? There are many cryptocurrencies around that don’t solve real-world problems or have viable use cases and likely will not be around in 10 years. One great application of cryptocurrency is in IoT, we may see the IoT space begin to adopt cryptocurrency for micro-payments relatively soon.
As an academy, you want to share your knowledge and maybe turn non-crypto people into a crypto-ian. Which famous person, do you want to speak to, educate him/ her and make her believe in crypto, Binance, BND and Bitcoin?
I believe that one of the few people who would be willing to understand and learn is Elon Musk, his passion to drive forward in technological developments and change the world is something that resonates with blockchain and cryptocurrency. I’d love to sit down with Elon to explain the revolutionary change that a decentralized currency can bring to the world.
It’s even more important to educate students, the next generation, as they are the ones that will be the ones who will have their voices heard in the next 10-20 years.
Blockcast.cc: Can you share an inspiring quote for our readers?
Jager: “There is no more profitable investment than investing in yourself. It is the best investment you can make; you can never go wrong with it. It is the true way to improve yourself to be the best version of you and lets you be able to best serve those around you.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Blockcast.cc: Thank you Jager.