1/ Hi, I’m Arun Philips 👋 From a small town in Kerala, a childhood filled with books in peaceful Oman, to growing Web3 communities of 500,000+ globally and consulting national governments. Here’s my journey at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, and impact 🙏

A day in my life as an @JoinEdgeCity Citizen 🌴 7-8 AM · 5k Run on the Beach 8-9 AM · Meditation and Yoga led by incredible instructors 9-10 AM · Breakfast and Filter Coffee 10-11 AM · My Daily Sitar Practice 11-12 PM · Blood Tests for Longevity Biomarkers with DeepHolistics 12-1 PM · Attending a Music Production talk with @riffledotstudio 1-2 PM · Helping Local Businesses use AI and Claude through @GroundFloorLab 2-3 PM · Sampling delicious Goan snacks from Goa State Biodiversity Board and Making tourism in Goa sustainable with Regen Goa 3-4 PM · Ground Floor Team Residency meeting to plan our next session 4-5 PM · Weekend Tours to learn about Goa's Culture and History 5-6 PM · Beach Football and Pool Time 6-7 PM · Sunset on the Beach and Chill Walks 7-8 PM · Community Dinner! my fav part of Edge City so far 8-9 PM · Insane Live music and Dinner 9-10 PM · Wrapping up the night with afters and journaling 👀 Would you live this life for a month?

Such an honour to be part of the Ground Floor residency at @JoinEdgeCity, creating real impact for 50 local businesses in Goa ✨

What an absolute privilege and honor to be part of @IBM India's national hackathon, held at Sri Ramakrishna College of Arts and Science in Coimbatore on the 12th and 13th of September! (and we made a major announcement - end of this post) A few things that stood out and truly impressed me: 1. IBM's dedication to designing and taking such a quality hackathon and startup education to tier 2 and tier 3 universities and colleges in India. I could immediately feel these universities don't usually get access to this quality of programming and usually it's limited to the IITs and the IIMs. They've made a strong effort to take it to the universities that needed it the most and I could tell that the students were learning immense amounts while building the projects. 2. The tracks chosen for the hackathon were superbly designed and critical: road safety, disaster warning and identification with AI, cybersecurity, and my favorite was the community-owned farmer credit system. Really well-thought-out and brilliantly articulated problem statements for the students. 3. The students and the faculty from the universities accompanying them: many of them traveled 2-3 days to reach the venue and had many limitations. They truly were incredible in the way they built products and the way they were thinking about problems to these highly critical solutions. Just the energy and the excitement was so infectious. It reminded me of something that I truly enjoy doing. I loved being in that environment, talking to these students about world changing solutions. Even hours after the event got over, I was there, talking to students, sharing feedback. The main advice, the takeaways I was giving them were: 1. Don't sell yourself short. In this world of AI there's no college student, there's no senior-experienced founder. Everyone's on a level playing field. You have all the resources in the world given to you, it's all about the belief you have in yourself, persistence, and grit. Don't be afraid to dream ambitiously even if you're just a second-year student. 2. Don't let the momentum die, don't let the excitement of the hackathon disappear as soon as you go back to your respective universities, continue working on these ideas. Take the support of all of the incredible partners like IBM, the university, and the local startups and partners. That's why @DreamStarterXYZ and the @decenteverythin Fund made a huge announcement: Up to ₹5 Lakhs in grant & match funding for top 10 teams + internships and job offers for top builders! Super grateful to @ManiMadhukar and all the amazing IBMers who put in so much effort into making this happen and for welcoming me with so much kindness. Special shout-out to each and every student and builder I spoke to, your energy truly made me come alive.

Had an absolutely incredible time at #ETHKochi by @Web3_kerala this weekend at Kerala @startup_mission, speaking to the future stewards of Web3 in India. Young energy, many new to crpto, who didn't understand a lot of crypto, but I think they are the ones who can revive that future we wanted to build, they don't need to make the same mistakes that have been made so far. I shared the concept and the promise of true decentralization. Shared honest insights from an enlightening conversation I had with my Uber driver Daniel about the problems of decentralization, about solving the network cold start problem, about safety, security, and who takes responsibility in a fully decentralized world. The summary of the talk was also that we simply haven't reached that far yet. Except for the use case of money, we've failed to deliver that promise of decentralization when it comes to many other ideas and industries, mainly because of human greed. The promise of decentralization has just been used to extract from retail, sometimes worse than the centralized paradigm. But we left with a shining ray of hope thanks to the incredible @Web3_kerala community. We spoke for hours even after the event was over, discussing what kind of ideas we should decentralize first. For me, the highlight was this really amazing discussion with @Boldrin71 about what a community token design could look like. What could the design of this community token for #W3K look like? Imagine there's a community token, and 80% of this token is reserved for the network, for the community. For eg. there are 40 million Malayalees around the world. - 80% reserved for the Web3 Kerala network - 20% for contributors, teams, for the people building and executing this vision, event sponsors, and volunteers These token allocations are not immediately released. They are not immediately tradable because that's a big problem: when they are tradable, people dump them, there's no loyalty, and it fails to signify any true ownership. The interesting mechanism that we discussed was that these tokens, the contributor and the network tokens, all remain locked till we meet a particular network goal or a network milestone. With the example of @Web3_kerala this could be the total number of members we want to see in the community before the token is unlocked. It could be something like 1 million members join the community, and then the token is unlocked. This gives an incentive for existing members to grow the network and something that everyone works towards. When it eventually reaches that milestone of 1 million members, the network is mature enough and sustainable enough that these token unlocks for the initial community do not completely harm the ecosystem. There will still be a large chunk of allocation remaining for the rest of the network since we are allocating 80% maybe there are later milestones. Say a second milestone of 10 million members, and again, the tokens issued till we reach that milestone are locked. That was a really insightful discussion, and I felt like, okay, this is a mechanism that could definitely work. It was a power-packed, incredible event filled with superb energy in my home city. I also shared about the @decenteverythin Fund and how the next stage we're going to shortlist a few of these ideas with @Web3_kerala and the collective we're creating. We also have @buildinai4forindia from Delhi, some cool residencies @JoinEdgeCity we want to be part of this collective. hmu if you wanna be part of this collective, it's open for anyone who wants to be part of this vision, to help realize the true promise of decentralization, to contribute and bring these ideas to reality

ZABAL GAMEZ w/Arun from DreamStarter xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1rGmqqMvV…

I just got my @EFDevcon ticket! Next stop: Mumbai 🇮🇳 Join me at Devcon 8 from November 3–6, 2026 for four days of big ideas, technical depth, community, and the people building the future of open source technology. devcon.org/ticket/arunphilip…