Phil Kwok, co-founder and CEO of EasyA – Interview Series

Phil Kwok, co-founder and CEO of EasyA, is a blockchain entrepreneur, computer scientist, and educator who has been active in the Web3 ecosystem since 2013, contributing to numerous open-source blockchain protocols and initiatives. Before launching EasyA, he worked at leading international law firms including Sullivan & Cromwell and Linklaters after graduating from the University of Cambridge, where he later returned as a guest lecturer. A long-time advocate for making blockchain technology more accessible, Kwok combines his technical expertise, open-source contributions, and legal background to help grow EasyA into one of the fastest-growing platforms focused on Web3 education and developer onboarding.

EasyA is a Web3 education platform and mobile app founded by brothers Phil and Dom Kwok to make learning blockchain development accessible to anyone. The platform offers structured, challenge-based lessons that teach users how to build decentralized applications and deploy smart contracts directly from their phones, while also connecting learners with hackathons, developer communities, and startup opportunities. With a rapidly growing global user base and partnerships across universities and blockchain ecosystems, EasyA aims to train the next generation of developers and entrepreneurs building the decentralized internet. 🚀

You began contributing to open source blockchain projects in 2013, later worked in law, and went on to lecture at Cambridge before co-founding EasyA. What motivated you to start the company, and how did those earlier experiences influence the vision and structure of EasyA?

My brother Dom and I started EasyA because our mission is to accelerate the adoption of Web3. We believe that Web3 and blockchain are perhaps the single most important technology in the history of humanity. When I first stumbled across the Bitcoin white paper in 2013, I saw how powerful this technology could be: a completely decentralized peer-to-peer network that allows anybody to send money to one another without the need for a centralized intermediary.

And yet, since the beginning of crypto, and really Bitcoin, even though it is such an amazing technology, it surprised us that adoption hasn’t run at the pace we expected it to. Everybody should be using crypto every single day, and yet today, that’s obviously not the case. So that’s why we founded EasyA. We founded EasyA in order to accelerate the adoption of Web3 and bring this amazing technology, this strongly democratizing force, to everybody around the world.

EasyA has surpassed one million users learning Web3 from mobile devices. What user behaviours or patterns have surprised you most as the platform scaled?

EasyA has grown incredibly fast, and one of the user behaviours that’s really been our secret sauce is that we always start with the story. Most people think that developers need to learn by looking at code. In reality, the way that developers learn and come into Web3 is through the story.

That’s one thing that we saw very, very early on, that Dom and I realized, and that we leaned into. If you go into the EasyA app and you look at any one of our challenges, you’ll see that it always starts with the story of why this network was founded. That has enabled us to scale extremely rapidly, and it’s one of the reasons why the EasyA app has spread by word of mouth so quickly.

The EasyA model blends bite-sized learning with real coding challenges across major protocols. How do you prioritise which technologies or ecosystems to support next?

We choose which protocols to teach people about based on a number of factors. One of the most important is, of course, how many people are actually asking us to teach them about it. So, for example, the reason that we added the XRP Ledger pretty early on is because more people wanted to know how they could actually build on it and what it was really all about at a deeper level than what you might just read online or see in YouTube videos.

Of course, another really important factor is knowing the founders, knowing that they’re long-term, and knowing their long-term vision. And then there are all sorts of other things, like: is the technology interesting, or is it just another copy-paste fork of another protocol? Is there something really behind it? Is there something exciting that we see could actually accelerate the adoption of Web3, which is, after all, our mission?

In your view, what separates builders who just learn Web3 from those who go on to launch funded startups?

There are a couple of things that separate builders who just learn from those who actually go on to launch funded startups. One of the key things, of course, is the ability to tap into the power of EasyA. Going through the EasyA app, learning through the story of why Web3, why this particular protocol, why even build in Web3, and importantly, what to actually build.

A lot of people don’t know what to build, and EasyA, through our app, teaches people through the story so that they understand what is important for them to build.

We also have the hackathons that we host in some of the greatest cities in the world: San Francisco, London, Boston, Hong Kong, Singapore, Austin, Toronto, pretty much you name it. These are the places that enable people to build. EasyA is the launchpad that empowers people to understand Web3, launch, and then importantly, get connected up in the ecosystem.

EasyA alumni projects are now valued in the billions and backed by leading investors. How do you see education platforms like yours influencing where capital flows next in crypto?

EasyA is one of the leading indicators for where investors should be looking. That’s why we have so many VCs who come along to our hackathons to actually see what smart people are working on. It’s the only way for them really to tell where they should put that capital.

Hackathons appear central to your ecosystem. How do in-person events and remote learning reinforce each other for founders building in crypto?

In-person events are extremely important because they enable founders to network with one another, to meet each other, and to form those bonds that go beyond the purely metaphysical. It’s the bond that you get from building alongside one another over the course of 48 hours, sometimes even 72 hours, really in the depths of it, in the trenches, building this new ecosystem up from scratch.

The shift toward alternative career paths is accelerating. How should investors evaluate founders who emerge from open communities rather than traditional tech backgrounds?

One of the things that we’ve found is that you can come from anywhere. Web3 is unique in that respect. You can be a student studying at university. You can be somebody who pivoted from a high-flying, illustrious career at one of the FAANG companies. You can be somebody who studied history at university and then went on to work in journalism. Or you can be somebody who was working in finance. Whatever your background, you can come into Web3.

Web3 is unique in that respect, where actually you can start from anywhere. This is what we’ve been able to help nurture within EasyA.

The best investors realise that it’s about the founder and whether they have that dog in them – it’s all about the founders rather than anything else.

How do you measure success for someone who uses EasyA? Is it course completion, product launches, funding milestones, or long-term ecosystem contribution?

Ultimately, measuring success for us is really simple: we look at how much impact our users are bringing to Web3. That can be in a number of different ways. It could be as simple as a person now understanding what Web3 is and why it’s so important, so they can then educate their friends about it. On another level, it could also be somebody who built an incredible startup. We’ve had startups come out of EasyA that are worth millions and millions of dollars, sometimes even billions.

So for us, we measure success by the impact they are having. Course completions are important, and product launches are important as well. But ultimately, everybody has their own way of contributing. Especially when you get to our scale, when you’re looking at the over one million users we have at EasyA, our impact is widespread and comes in many, many different forms. Ultimately, again, driving the adoption of Web3.

As AI increasingly lowers the barrier to product development, how do you see AI tools reshaping the speed and quality at which new crypto startups are built?

AI has been an amazing accelerant to crypto and also to EasyA. AI has fundamentally accelerated the feedback loop through which builders and developers in our community are able to iterate. They’re able to learn Web3 development a lot more quickly, which ultimately has boosted the speed with which we’re able to see these launches.

For example, at our last hackathon, the EasyA Consensus Hackathon in Hong Kong, we had builders create more within those two days than previously people had been able to make in weeks. AI will fundamentally help developers build dApps faster and more quickly than ever before.

Within the EasyA app, we leverage AI in order to teach users faster and are currently working on ways to use AI to personalise the whole learning experience end to end.

Looking ahead, what role do you want EasyA to play in the broader digital asset ecosystem? Talent pipeline, founder incubator, infrastructure layer, or something entirely different?

EasyA is the lifeblood of Web3. Without EasyA, Web3 crumbles, because blockchains fundamentally need people building on them in order to succeed. We have the full funnel: people learn about Web3 in the EasyA app, then come to build and launch at our hackathons, and then raise money and launch pioneering startups.

We’re the way that crypto gains mass adoption. If you believe in Web3, you believe in EasyA.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to become educated on blockchain technology and Web3 should visit EasyA.