Meet the 13-year-old Goa boy managing millions of dollars in cryptocurrency

The cryptocurrency craze which has taken over the world in the past few years has reached a point where even middle-school students in India are participating and excelling. One such student is 13-year-old Gajesh Naik, the creator of PolyGaj, a cryptocurrency money managing ecosystem.

Gajesh is a Class 8 student at People's High School in Panaji. Last year, he started creating online educational content when the country was under lockdown due to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The content produced by Gajesh was meant to help primary school students from vernacular schools as physical classes were shut down due to the pandemic.
 
This year, Gajesh has developed two dapps (decentralised applications) on the Polygon network. The apps -- PolyGaj and StableGaj -- provide users access to crypto-investing.

While PolyGaj is a one-stop decentralised finance (De-Fi) and non-fungible token (NFT) platform, StableGaj is a decentralised stablecoin swap which provides stablecoin exchange on the Polygon network, according to a report in The Times of India.

De-Fi is a term used for non-custodial software programs that manage a user's cryptocurrency without the need for intermediaries like investment managers or banking systems.

PolyGaj is built on the Polygon blockchain, which has now managed $7 million in cryptocurrency. This includes a recent investment in Polygon blockchain from billionaire Mark Cuban.

"Since the last one year, when physical classes were discontinued due to the pandemic, I decided to take and completed some online certificate courses, including from University at Buffalo, State University of New York," Gajesh told the daily.
 
He had begun learning coding at a boot camp when he was just eight years old. Since then, he has mastered coding languages such as  C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Solidity.

In 2018, Gajesh attended lectures at an international blockchain congress in Goa which ignited his interest in blockchain technology.

"Since then he equipped himself with requisite blockchain programming skills and blockchain programming languages. Being a relatively newer topic with less knowledge availability in the public domain, Gajesh takes direct tutelage from professors of MIT and Stanford," his father Siddhivinayak, who is Goa civil service officer, said.

Gajesh has over 22,100 followers on Twitter where he regularly takes part in discussions on cryptocurrency. He also has a YouTube channel with over 12,000 subscribers.

Also Read: e-RUPI launch cheers cryptocurrency industry

Also Read: Cryptocurrency prices today: Bitcoin loses over 2%; Ethereum, Dogecoin, Stellar fall