Dear New York

Dear New York,

Whether it is through expression of creativity and art through food, music, fashion, or domination of industries like finance, healthcare or technology, there are few cities that come close to having the global impact of a city like New York. It’s no coincidence the saying, “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” was given to the city so nice they had to name it twice. New York has always been seen as the pinnacle of achievement across industries, establishing leaders who have inspired children around the world to become the greatest version of themselves. In order to understand the vision and mission of this Decentralized Automated Organization (DAO), it would be helpful to understand my academic journey through the New York State public school education system and the progression of my professional career in financial services. This will help you better understand the framework for how we aim to decentralize opportunity through the education system and aim to create a community focused on providing our global community with educational and financial infrastructure through the formation of multiple blockchain applications with Dreamfund.

Educational Foundation: A New York State Public School Dreamer

Growing up in the Bronx, being the child of first generation immigrants in a single income household was the start of your story. My story started at the intersection of Gun Hill Road and Knox Place in the Norwood section of the Bronx. I grew up in a 2 bedroom apartment with 4 older siblings with a stay at home mother and a father who worked as a doorman at Gracie Gardens in the upper east side of Manhattan. Space was limited, so naturally I would spend most of my days out on Knox Place with friends who became family. Our community bonded on our religious views and the desire to “make it out of the hood”. My mother’s strict budgeting and my fathers weekly overtime shifts helped us get by. Our only path to escaping poverty was through the NYC public school education system. Free lunch and our teachers guiding us through life lessons taught through tangents that deviated from our core curriculum, helped raise us in a world where our parents failed to culturally assimilate since they did not speak English. This ended up becoming a blessing for us as our classrooms turned into a melting pot of cultures. We learned early on our differences were a strength, not a weakness. We traveled the world through sharing experiences and culture in our classrooms at the Sheila Mencher School (PS/MS 95), as our classmates turned into an extension of our being. Unfortunately our schools did not have funding for sports programs, but we were blessed with educational after school programs. Our guidance counselors worked tirelessly to ensure we were given opportunities to out grow our situations and save our families from the shackles of poverty. As a kid in the 6th grade, I received my first opportunity to prove myself academically on a national level. I was distinguished as a Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth talent search winner by scoring in the 70th percentile in the Math section of the SATs. My performance on the exam allowed me to attend summer classes with college bound seniors at the University of California — Santa Cruz campus. The cost of the program was one my family couldn’t afford but my brother informed my father that it was absolutely necessary for me to attend the program as it would increase my chances of getting into a prestigious university and help the family move out of the Bronx. Thankfully I was able to attend the program, as the cost of the program was subsidized by federal grant programs drastically reducing the cost of attending. This program was my first introduction to economics and how the stock market works. The following summer I was able to attend a prepatory program at the Bronx High School of Science where I was able to learn the 8th grade math curriculum in an exhaustive 2 month program, in order to prepare for the rigorous entrance exam for specialized high schools in New York City. Upon receiving the results of the exam, I flipped my desk over and pumped my fist as if I was Michael Jordan hitting a game clinching shot in the playoffs. I ran home in excitement and was met with cheers from my community as I ran up the stairs to share the great news with my mother and father.

My excitement was short lived as my family would move out of the Bronx and into Yonkers, half way through my first semester. Fortunately, a resident at the building my father worked in heard the news and put us in contact with an attorney who previously worked as the head of the NYC Board of Education. He sensed the urgency of my situation and wanted to help me and my father. At the end of each semester the city requested my family to move back into the city due to zoning laws or I would have to transfer to a high school in Yonkers. My attorney and family recognised the importance of remaining at Bronx Science and would fight tooth and nail to get the city to allow me to remain enrolled. After meeting with him multiple times after school in his lower manhattan office, he was able to work out a deal where I was able to remain matriculated at the public school for 3 additional semesters, as long as we covered the cost of tuition on behalf of the city. After two years though, the city had taken a hard stance and required me to transfer schools, no longer allowing me to attend New York City public high schools. Fortunately for me, Yonkers High School had an internationally recognized International Baccalaureate (IB) program. After two years of isolation from friends who lived 2–3 hours away from my home in Yonkers, I was finally able to immerse my self in a new culture balanced between the arts and academia. The sudden switch had enabled me to enjoy a more traditional suburban high school experience, forming relationships with my local community, developing life long bonds with friends and teachers who took me in as their own kin. Through the IB program I was able to pursue my intellectual curiosity and study my Pashtun cultural roots as well as develop a new found obsession with Economics, particularly how the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act led to the formation of a massive risk bubble in the bond market that triggered the Great Recession of 2008.

Professional Career: Pursuing a Career in Finance Graduating From a Non-Target University

After completing my IB Diploma and extended essay (thesis) on the economic conditions that led to the Great Recession of 2008, I was inspired to study economics further at Binghamton University and build a career in financial services as a Product Manager working across different sectors of financial services specializing on all phases of the trade settlement lifecycle. However my dream was always to work at a Hedge Fund. Coming from a non-target university, those opportunities weren’t available to me. This fueled my hunger for knowledge, grasping at any and every opportunity to learn about how the economic machine functioned. This transformed into an obsession for studying technical analysis, macroeconomic theory, financial modeling, technology/crypto architecture systems, derivatives, market structure, monetary policy, alternative data and crypto twitter. This paired perfectly with my professional experience, where I worked on projects focused on STP through process automation gaining experience within prime brokerage, SWIFT messaging (ISO 20022), data warehousing, reference data, post trade settlement, corporate actions, CCARs stress testing, tax reporting/auditing, custodial services, vault services, product enhancement, dev-ops, roadmapping and strategic planning as I gained experience working with architecture systems for Bank of America — Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan DTCC and GlobeTax Services.

Emergent Technologies: Establishing a Foundational Understanding of the Future Convergence of Technology and Society

New economies have started to form around newly constructed cities globally, however there are still constraints around economic development due to limitations imposed by local governance and limited access to opportunity. The concept of property rights and stable currencies, remain the fundamental building blocks for all economies. Through the evolution of the web and mobile devices, from the early days of static webpages and emails during Web 1.0 to the emergence of the application era and smart devices during Web 2.0, the emergence of technology has connected our world in a way few ever could have imagined. As we enter the era of Web 3.0, we have an opportunity to bridge this gap for our global community through the formation of a decentralized open web, where individual users are able to assert sovereignty over their wealth and digital intellectual property.

Since the advent of decentralized finance, we’ve seen the creation of decentralized lending platforms and financial innovation through applications that have the potential to empower global communities in a way our legacy financial systems cannot. Financial decentralization is just the start though.

The United States has always been seen as an open democracy that promotes individuals to speak and innovate freely. Our democracy enables us to share our ideas and conduct commerce with limited restrictions on our ability to disrupt. Our global hegemony status has helped us maintain our presence as a global leader, however, our core principles of freedom and access to education, along with the evolution of technology, have sparked economic development across the world.

Certain limitations still impede us from reaching our full potential as a global community. The internet has connected us, allowing us to expand our outreach through social networks, swiftly sending bits of data seamlessly through the internet. Our financial system however, depends on legacy infrastructure systems that increase latency and inhibit our ability to access the global financial system. Whether it’s our inability to send money to loved ones across borders or events like the GameStop saga that created a liquidity crunch due to T+2 settlement structure on trades, there is a place for disruption in financial services through open decentralized networks.

The emergence of bitcoin, ethereum and similar blockchain networks demonstrated the endless possibilities of decentralized applications when we combine open decentralized networks with money systems. The back end infrastructure that our monetary systems rely on today are simply data systems with multiple layers of verifications (inclusive of “four eye checks” focused on eliminating human error) and banks communicating across bifurcated systems. Bitcoin enables users to send funds to another user, while the networks validators maintain a ledger through a decentralized network of nodes ensuring proof and secure transfer of funds, all without a trusted third party acting as an intermediary.

Our mission is focused on creating sustainable communities in the metaverse as well as in the real world. New York has a unique opportunity, as the financial capital of the world, to lead the world’s pivot towards the decentralization of finance and data, as we embark on this journey into the era of artificial intelligence and the sovereign individual. In the next two letters, I will be mapping out how we can leverage decentralization to liberate the hearts and minds of the kids of the future through decentralization of education and opportunity through the formation of a global decentralized metaverse. I look forward to sharing this vision with you further and help take the lead on making New York the blockchain capital of the world.

From the Bronx to the World … With Love,

Zain Lughmani

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