Aspergers, Betrayal and Mixed Reality Vodka; How London’s Biggest Hackathon Unfolded for One Startup Founder

It’s easy to make friends but not so easy to keep them. That’s the life of John Tsopanis, a startup founder with Aspergers who on first glance seems to be the most sociable person in any room.

Look a little deeper and all isn’t what it seems.

London’s biggest hackathon (Ethereum London hosted by Encode) kicked off on Friday with over 200 teams competing for prizes from the world’s largest crypto and web3 companies. Google headlined the sponsor sheet with crypto titans Tezos, Near and API-3 all hosting their own hacking challenges for competing teams.

Amongst the Red Bull fuelled chaos was a startup called 1UP, a web3 social network building mixed reality experiences and AI celebrity holograms on the Tezos blockchain.

The goal was simple; turn up on Friday with an idea – recruit a team of hackers to build – win some prizes – go out and celebrate.

Simple enough plan, but what unfolded was anything but.

John describes his biggest issue with Aspergers as ‘literalism’; or ‘social blindness’.

“Aspergers is a superpower”, John begins before pausing with a wry smile, “But….when you trust people at face value, are blind to the emotional temperature of a room – especially resentment and insecurity – and are maniacally convinced that the rational course of action is the course of action people will take whether they feel threatened by you or not, well…people with nothing to lose and a lot to gain will often try and get one over you.”

John laughs reflectively and reluctantly admits, “The big problem I have is that I actually really love conflict; it’s a serious source of adrenaline for me and as a startup founder I’m masochistically conditioned to seek out that perfect down-and-out underdog victory. Conflict fuels me; and yeah the story of this weekend was the story of me getting hit pretty hard early, and then using that as fuel to claw my way back to an almost impossible victory.”

John’s story started on Friday morning; messaging 25 hackers who were looking for a team and convincing 12 of them to join his projects Flexr and Minted. The idea for Flexr was a mixed reality fitness app seeking to challenge Strava and Sweatcoin; Minted would be an AI powered mixed reality fashion marketplace – the web3 version of Vinted.

The AI art for both concepts was looking swanky, the hackers were convinced, and the kickoff for the hackathon was schedule for 9pm.

9pm arrives and 7 of the team, including all of the mobile and blockchain developers had decided to set up their own teams, attempting to beat John at his own game using his ideas against him.

“NDAs aren’t a thing at hackathons and I guess these kids were in it for the bounties and not to try and build serious businesses” John says with the first tint of bitterness in his voice since we started speaking. He then breaks into a smile, “We pulled it off though”

John pivoted his Flexr and Minted ideas into a 1UP idea which focussed on building a decentralised ad network similar to Brave (the internet browser founded by Mozilla and built on Ethereum) into a mobile social network. The core technical concept was to bridge offchain advertiser data on Google Analytics with onchain social media user data on 1UP and Tezos. He then minted mixed reality and AI chatbot assets onto the NFT auctionplace and even showcased his latest mixed reality work for Sidemen’s new vodka brand ‘XIX’ which he superimposed onto the Shard building.

Despite being short on technical resources the 1UP team which comprised of John, Ema Pop, Vipul and Jay Popat (an Indian father son duo attending their first ever hackathon together), Olubusayo Amowe, and business development director Balbir Judge, 1UP were able to take a first prize in the Tezos hackathon competition.

1UP plans to continue building with Tezos and entering into several more hackathons before the New Year. When asked to sum up John’s performance at the hackathon Balbir Judge said, “Resilience, toughness and a hell of a lot of charisma is what’s needed to convince a team of people you’ve just me to go through 3 days of no sleep and adverse circumstances with you. Put it this way; he could be Derren Brown and he still couldn’t convince me to do half the things his dev team were willing to do for him this weekend. He’s a force of nature, a freak, and his energy levels are just so high all the time. Add to that the fact he’s a technical genius and yeah, that’s why I’m behind everything he does and I know his time at the top of web3 is only just beginning.”