Selvakumar S © 2026
An 8-year journey from an airdrop hunter in a small town to becoming a Blockchain Engineer building products, teaching students, and continuously exploring decentralized technologies.
All those ups and downs brought me to my current role as an Innovation Engineer at KGiSL. Now I spend my time building products, mentoring students, and coding across Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos. Explaining tech to newcomers taught me that true mastery is about making complex things simple. I did not choose this path, it chose me.
An 8-year journey from an airdrop hunter in a small town to becoming a Blockchain Engineer building products, teaching students, and continuously exploring decentralized technologies.
Growing up in a small town, my family was struggling financially. Like any student, I desperately searched for ways to earn online. I spent nights trying CAPTCHA typing, random blogs, and basic editing gigs, but made nothing. Then, I typed "how to earn money in crypto" into Google. I had no idea that one search would rewrite my entire future.
I knew zero about blockchain. Honestly, I did not care about the tech at first, I just wanted to pay my bills. I threw myself into airdrop hunting, chasing campaigns, retweet tasks, and staying up until 4 AM minting NFTs. I was doing anything to survive, viewing crypto as a quick digital hustle.
My first real win happened in my 12th standard. I woke up to a $90 SafePal airdrop just for doing simple social tasks. Instead of spending it on myself, I put every dollar back into testing more protocols. Over the next few years, I explored over a thousand different dApps across different ecosystems.
Without knowing the underlying code, I was learning the ropes as a power user. I was minting, swapping, bridging, and getting comfortable with Web3 interfaces. I was building a massive, intuitive understanding of what makes a blockchain application user friendly.
During my second year of college, the Arbitrum airdrop landed. I received ARB tokens worth $7,000 across two of my wallets. This was completely mind blowing. For the first time, I could breathe. I did not buy a fancy phone or bike; instead, I decided to use this freedom to fund my masters degree and double down on my path.
That Arbitrum money got me out of my hometown Thoothukudi and brought me to Bengaluru to study Data Science at Christ University. I arrived expecting everyone in the tech hub to be talking about Web3, but most had never even owned a wallet. I quickly became the go to blockchain guy on campus.
February 6, 4 AM: My wallet got hacked. Years of savings wiped out in seconds. It was devastating. My PG rent was ₹10,000, but my father's entire monthly income was only ₹8,000. Asking home for help was not an option. I was completely on my own, facing the dark side of decentralized systems.
Getting hacked was the best and worst thing to happen to me. Instead of searching for the next payout, I needed answers: "How did they steal it?" "How does Ethereum actually work under the hood?" I read smart contract code, protocol security docs, and RPC structures day and night, connecting my years of usage to real engineering.
Using my Data Science background, I began mixing AI models with blockchain ledger tech. I built BlockE to keep user data private. When I presented my prototype, my professor looked at me and said my project was the only one solving a real problem rather than just rendering another dashboard. That feedback lit a fire in me: Learn, build, repeat.
When placement season arrived, I skipped the safe Data Science corporate jobs. I only wanted to build on chains. I applied everywhere online, learning that companies did not care about airdrop metrics, they wanted production ready code. I got into Hooman as an intern and immediately started writing code deployed to mainnets.
Over my developer journey, I have built over 40 projects ranging from local dApps to mainnet smart contracts. I am always shipping open source tools, fixing developer bugs, and trying to build things that help the Web3 developer ecosystem grow.
All those ups and downs brought me to my current role as an Innovation Engineer at KGiSL. Now I spend my time building products, mentoring students, and coding across Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos. Explaining tech to newcomers taught me that true mastery is about making complex things simple. I did not choose this path, it chose me.