February 2025 Update Highlights at a Glance:
- Continuing the conversation with Pasco County Schools
- Meeting with Cathie and Caitlin Wood for ARK Educate collaboration
- Staying focused on the big picture with the Blockchain Association monthly member meeting
- Creating a dedicated home for our initiative, “A.B.E” (Ardent Blockchain Education)
New Sunshine State Standards Emerge
First and foremost, I must express my gratitude to both Bobbi Starling and Matt Wicks from Pasco County. We kicked off the month by meeting to discuss how our project could add value to Pasco County Schools and its students and teachers. We chatted about how our initiative got started and our timelines for producing content for the curriculum.
What was most enlightening about our meeting, however, is that there are new specific standards that deal with “digital currencies” in relation to financial management. This discovery left me excited, knowing that in our meeting with Senator Burgess in December, he suggested expanding our initiative into financial literacy for digital assets.
Using these new standards will inform how we create curriculum content around these issues moving forward, and we hope to share our first samples in the coming months with Bobbi and Matt from Pasco County for their review and feedback.
Furthering the ARK Educate <> A.B.E Collaboration
Mid-month, CEO Ray Alvarez and I met with Cathie Wood and several of the ARK Invest staff at their offices in downtown St. Petersberg to further discuss our initiative and its aims. Though she couldn’t be there, her daughter and co-Managing Director of ARK Educate , Caitlin Wood, dialed in to participate.
ARK MeetingOur conversation ranged the gamut when it came to topical touchpoints, from inspiring students by instilling an innovation-based mindset to the successful rollouts of their pilot programs at the middle school level in Pinellas County Schools. In the end, we all left the gathering feeling invigorated by our future work together that will undoubtedly benefit students all over the state of Florida.
A Bright Blockchain Future
As members of the Blockchain Association , the largest national trade association in the United States, we enjoy taking part in their monthly member meetings. This month included a recap of all the action happening in Washington, D.C., from stable coin legislation to the President’s Working Group seeking to educate the White House on our burgeoning industry.
There’s certainly a lot of momentum and tailwinds helping usher in a wave of innovation, and the BA staff is excited about what we are doing with our A.B.E. initiative here in Florida. Before long, Ray and I hope to lead a members-only working group on education so that we can better incorporate more leading voices in the Web3 industry to help our advocacy efforts
Coming Soon: A New, Dedicated Webpage for A.B.E
Throughout this month’s update, I have been referring to the Ardent Blockchain Education Initiative as simply “A.B.E,” which is an acronym we recently created internally. This is merely a prelude to a much larger discussion the team has been having about creating a dedicated website for the initiative so we have a landing page that contains all the essential information about who we are and what we are trying to achieve.
Hopefully, we will have this published very soon, but the renderings that have been produced already look great and will undoubtedly help us spread the word as we increase our outreach throughout the rest of the spring.
Thanks for taking the time to read this month’s update. I’m confident that we’ll have more great news to share at the end of March. Until then, stay tuned!
