From Ethereum Idealist to Business Realist

In 2018, just a few months after Hayden Adams was introduced to crypto (by Karl Floersch, who also appears on the Most Influential 2023 list), Adams flew to South Korea to attend the Deconomy conference. He had been laid off from his first job out of college, a Siemens mechanical engineer, in mid-2017, and spent the intervening time learning to code, beginning essentially with beginner’s-unfriendly smart contracts.