Child’s play: Gajesh Naik, 13, manages a fortune in DeFi

At 13, it is hard to believe that anyone can understand the potential — and responsibility and danger — of holding private keys to half a million dollars while living life as a normal seventh-grader in India.

What makes the case of Gajesh Naik, the 13-year-old decentralized finance (DeFi) wunderkind from Goa, so unique is that while he can design a DeFi protocol able to accept $1 million of investors’ money, he is too young to sign a legal contract or be held liable for any loss. Would you trust your money to an unproven teenage developer with just half a year’s programming experience on solidity?

Time flies

Naik started out with a YouTube channel, teaching people to code, before switching to smart contract consulting. Today, his DeFi protocol, PolyGaj, manages nearly $1 million.

Given his age, it’s fascinating to see how he views time, and instead of years or quarters, Naik speaks in months, “I was freelancing for three months, and launched two projects.”

While many would consider a three-month block of blockchain consulting experience as little more than an internship, Naik describes it in a way that makes it sound more like a career phase, as if it would be more appropriate for the statement of three to refer to years instead of months.

This is to be expected, seeing as a younger person will naturally perceive time as happening more slowly — a year can be the equivalent of up to 20% of a 10-year-old’s “conscious” life, the equivalent of six years for someone aged 30, or a decade for a 50-year-old. What’s more, the speed at which information is processed slows down with age, meaning that the ability for younger people to absorb and utilize new information is much higher. As such, Naik may be correct to see his three months of consulting as a foundation of his career.

With what we will call “plenty” of industry experience, relatively speaking, Naik graduated to launching his own project, PolyGaj, which is based on a similar platform on the Binance Smart Chain called Goose Finance. The eponymous elephant-themed DeFi platform allows users to trade and farm tokens, namely PolyGaj (GAJ) and StableGaj (SGAJ). There is also the potential to place coins in pools promising as much as 34% APR on Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) and 62% APR on Tether (USDT).

StableGaj is not Stablecoin

— gajesh.eth