In this episode of Exponential, Wucklace, a self-taught developer and creator of Exhibition DeFi, shares his path from fashion design to building onchain — and why he’s working a new kind of platform on Nexus.

His journey started with crypto trading and quickly deepened. “I love the concept of total ownership,” he says, recalling his first experience with non-custodial wallets. “There is no restriction, no permission. I can do anything I like with the wallet. That got me curious.”

That curiosity led him to question the way token launches work today. “Once a token dies, the project barely lives,” he says. “I believe the issue is in the way we launch tokens."

His solution is Exhibition DeFi, a deterministic token launch platform built on Nexus. “If there is anything important, it must be defined before the launch,” he explains. That includes parameters like supply, liquidity, distribution, and funding targets — all enforced by the protocol.

For Wucklace, Nexus was the natural fit. “Nexus does not treat verifiability as an option,” he says. “It is built into the execution layer.” That alignment gave him the confidence to move beyond a demo and start building toward a production-ready protocol.

His advice to other developers is to resist hype and focus on what matters. “A developer should define the rules before anything else,” he says. “Do your work based on what we really need — what will bring the mass adoption we’re looking for.”

Looking ahead, he’s focused on refining Exhibition DeFi and prototyping additional utilities to help other builders with token distribution and onchain workflows.

In this episode of Exponential, Oliwer Nastaziak, chief growth officer at Fren.One, shares what it’s like to build and moderate internet-native communities — and why those communities matter more than ever.

Oliwer has been deep in the trenches of community operations for years, first as a Telegram moderator and now helping lead Fren.One, a firm he describes as “a community operating system.” The FriendOne team works to manage everything from real-time support to scam prevention, all while fostering long-term relationships and infrastructure.

In this episode of Exponential, Joseph Zhang, co-founder and CEO of CatchBack, explains how a side hustle flipping Pokémon cards evolved into a full-stack collectibles trading platform. Combining lessons from crypto infrastructure with firsthand experience in collectibles, CatchBack introduces a new model for how real-world assets can trade online.

“Crypto taught me about liquidity,” Joseph says. “In collectibles, things move slowly. Our goal was to bring the efficiency of crypto tooling to physical trading cards.”