This month Wall Street meet its match with Sapien. Network.
Hundreds of guests gathered for a night to celebrate the company that is stirring up the great American melting pot. The epic night came after the October 18 reveal of a massive, 7-foot tall statue of Harambe downtown. The appearance at Bowling Green Park, directly facing off with the Charging Bull in Manhattan made headlines across the world as a symbol of the outrageous disparity in wealth between the 1% and everyone else. 10,000 bananas surrounded Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull to illustrate just how ‘bananas’ Wall Street has become.
The bananas were distributed to local food shelves in Greater New York City, but the meaning of the movement stayed on Wall Street and throughout the minds of America.
The inspirational protest was led by Sapien.Network co-founders Ankit Bhatia, Robert Giometti and Teja Aluru. For them the bronze statue of Harambe, contrasted with the bronze Charging Bull of Wall Street, represents the millions of everyday people who struggle under a system that enriches wealthy elites and leaves the average person behind.
Sapien was founded in 2016 by Ankit and Rob Giometti while they were students at University of California, Berkeley. Ankit and Rob shared a deep concern for the role that social media was playing in increasing social polarization, aggravating mental health and addiction problems, undermining democratic processes, and inhibiting our ability to collectively solve important social problems. They committed to building a real alternative.
At Berkeley the pair built the prototype that would later become Sapien.Network, a tokenized social network built on the Ethereum blockchain.
During a sit down interview Ankit shared some reflections, “We’ve just been on this journey where we’re thinking more and more about how to address these problems and really just in the past six weeks it dawned upon us that the a best way to address this is actually abstract. Some of these problems that exist across different domains such as Facebook. But it’s really this idea that we don’t like when systems become overly complex and start losing that human accountability.
And when we start losing that sort of human connection because and then the day systems don’t have feelings, you know? We can’t offload our responsibility for them to make the right decision and to ask to be fundamentally human. If we convince enough people to have the collective to come together and make sense of the world, find their values and take collective action. And that’s the only way that we can actually reach somewhere worthy as a species together.”
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