Entrepreneur and DJ: Meet Christian Deciga

Everipedia is the “encyclopedia of everything” of the internet. It can be viewed as an extension of Wikipedia, but it varies in a few notable ways. It is the more open alternative to Wikipedia that Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, requested be built in his “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” blog in July of 2008. Everipedia provides incentives for editors to edit and create articles actively and ensure that they are accurate. Editors are rewarded with “IQ,” which is a cryptocurrency and the basis of the blockchain platform that Everipedia is built on. Apart from rewarding editors for their contributions, Everipedia also generally focuses on articles that Wikipedia deems “non-notable”. They do not believe in censoring any topics and offer more relaxations in their guidelines than English Wikipedia. Additionally, since this is a global decentralized encyclopedia built on the EOS.io blockchain, it means that the government cannot censor the website’s content. Presently, Everipedia has over a million page views a month, global active editors in places such as Nigera, Venezuela, and Korea.

Everipedia may have millions of visitors to the site now, but this was not always the case. Early on in their journey, the founders of Everipedia had difficulty finding investors and driving traffic to their website. This was when Christian Deciga stepped in. In October 2015, while studying to attain a bachelor’s degree in computer science at California State University, San Bernardino, he met Mahbod Moghadam and Sam Kazemian of Everipedia during a tech talk at nearby Cal Poly Pomona in October 2015, Deciga became interested in the project. In December of 2015, he dropped out of university and moved into the company’s first headquarters in Westwood, Los Angeles (PH2 at 972 Hilgard Ave. on UCLA campus) to become a founding member and work on the project full time. Due to clever ways of making Everipedia articles go viral without paid marketing on social media platforms, and other unique tactics, Deciga helped drive more traffic to the website during its early days. With his efforts, soon Everipedia began to see millions of page views a month. The growth had spiked from less than 80 concurrent users on Google Analytics to over 1000 users concurrently. Everipedia articles were also being used as sources by news publications (The New York Times even cited an Everipedia entry during President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign). He was dubbed “Christian Christ”by Mahbod Moghadam as his tactics helped bring traffic to Everipedia. Hence, Deciga’s efforts and work ethic gave Everipedia a fighting chance that it needed to take off to the next level and reach milestones.

With the help of Deciga’s efforts, the founders had data and impressive traffic numbers to show to their investors. By the end of that same year, the Everipedia team grew bigger and better, and the Westwood penthouse was filled with people working on this project.

Now, with a 30 million venture investment from Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Fund backing the project, Everipedia has plans to continue growing internationally and further its mission based on knowledge and DeFi (decentralized finance). The founding team, which includes Deciga, has plans to launch more decentralized dApps on the IQ network.

The latest dApp released on the IQ network is an easy to use prediction market called PredIQt. The knowledge market allows users to purchase and trade shares in the outcomes of future events. Users can earn money by correctly predicting whether or not any given event actually happens.

In addition to powering a decentralized global encyclopedia, the IQ token now also powers knowledge markets and the additional DeFi applications that will be built into PredIQt.

But this is not all for Deciga. Apart from being an entrepreneur and investor, Christian Deciga is also an electronic dance music producer and DJ who is receiving producer mentorship from his North Garland High School classmate and established EDM artist Juyen Sebulba of the duo Psycho Boys Club signed to Yellow Claw’s Barong Family label.

You can find Christian Deciga on his Instagram account (@christiandeciga)