Matt Espinoza

When Matthew Espinoza watched The Social Network in 8th grade, he was immediately inspired to try coding for himself. He registered for every programming group he could find, learning Javascript through Codecademy and constantly picking up new skills. He worked as a teaching assistant for the city of Greater Sudbury, Ontario, as well as a museum guide at Science North, helping to lead activities for young science enthusiasts. By the time Matt had declared a major in computer science at Laurentian University, online courses with Udemy had introduced him to the world of technology.

After joining the hacker community, Matt connected with new friends through Discord. Those friendships led Matt into online hackathons. After competing in the financial inclusion-centered hackathon Kiva Fall 2021, Matt went on to win Best Use of Conversational AI and 2nd place Overall at Treasure Hacks 3.0 for his work on JourneyGenie, an AI travel assistant which leveraged OpenAI’s existing large language model through API calls. Matt recently participated in ETHToronto, and will be joining hackNY to continue honing his programming and hacking skills this summer.

Perhaps Matt’s most impressive accomplishment to date has been founding his own startup, Agora Labs, a social token and NFT infrastructure platform. When Matt raised close to $20,000 for $MATT, his first social token using DeSo Protocol, he kept himself accountable to token-holders through regular check-ins. His dedication to continuous progress meant he was always growing, and his friends and family saw Matt’s social token as a way to invest in his promising career. With the social token space booming amongst creators, Agora was one of the first platforms to make it easy for creators to connect their DeSo tokens and choose specific rewards and perks for their supporters.

Matt continued to kickstart his career through Envision Accelerator and the RippleX Fellowship, scaling his knowledge of cryptocurrency at events organized by Kernel and the Crypto Society, and growing his web3 development skills through Developer DAO and Safary. Matt was admitted to the ultra-competitive Z Fellows startup fellowship,which includes mentorship from world-renowned founders of companies like Netflix, Eventbrite, DoorDash, and Tinder. Within weeks of Matt’s fellowship, Agora had secured over $100,000 in blockchain grants from DeSo, Harmony, and others, and reached a market cap of over $500,000 in under 72 hours on DeSo. In October of 2022, his startup was acquired by Talent Protocol and he joined the Talent Protocol team along with his co-founder, Freeman Zhang.

Matt says, “the people are EVERYTHING in the hacker community.” Since Agora’s acquisition, Matt has worked to help others find success in their careers in tech. He has dedicated himself to helping other hackers scale and sell their side projects, and was also a founding partner of Inner Circle, the largest invite-only tech group in Canada. Over the last year, Matt has hosted 3 events with more than 800 attendees as part of Inner Circle. In 2023, Matt completed the Major League Hacking (MLH) Fellowship, where he gained valuable experience as a hacker and developed his skill set through working with MapRoulette. Matt continues to assist others in their journeys through his newsletter, The Compound Advantage.