Jason “Vandal” Schadt is a Metaverse entrepreneur, investor, creator and decentralized community leader with vast experience working at the intersection of Web3 technologies, art and culture in global markets. To date, Vandal has sold over 100 NFTs (approx. 40 eth in total primary sale value), holds over $250K in metaverse real estate across leading Metaverses The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space and has built, produced and curated 50+ events in the Metaverse.

Vandal started his career as a Hip Hop artist in Toronto and later Malaysia where he was a pioneer in helping build the local Hip Hop scene and performed throughout Asia, including Japan, Mongolia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan and Indonesia. Along with Hip Hop's godfather DJ Kool Herc, Vandal has also performed alongside some of the world’s most famous musicians including Grammy Award winning band, The Roots, Blackalicious, The Herbaliser, DJ Jazzy Jeff and more. He also operated his own music and entertainment companies across Canada and Southeast Asia, including Movemint, a Malaysian entertainment company, which would eventually evolve into a Web3 music company under Vandal’s direction.

Being a part of the music industry in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, Vandal faced the digitization and commodification of music head on. Looking for a solution to this problem, he discovered the Web3 movement. Vandal bought his first Cryptokitty ($300M+ in NFT transaction volume to date) on December 10th 2017 and from there committed his career to exploring how Web3 can create new virtual ecosystems and economies around artists as the next evolution of entertainment.

Since 2017 Vandal has launched several NFT-based projects including Hip Hop the Blockchain an onboarding vehicle that aggregated Blockchain platforms for artists, NFTwrapper together with Bittrees that used Vault technology and DeFi for an Audio NFT use-case and DAOrecords, a Web3 Audio NFT record label and Metaverse events company, where he worked with Ren Stern and Frank Renaissance on their virtual fashion release. He also served on the Malaysian Blockchain Association from 2018-2020.

Most recently Vandal has been continued his community building through the NEAR x Music guild and DAO, with over 400 artists and $80K in funding distributed across community projects including NFTs and Metaverse events within the NEAR Protocol ecosystem, and is experimenting with ‘self-governance’ activities through his own DAO - VanDAO.

Through his work in the Metaverse, Vandal has established himself as a pioneer and prominent figure being featured as a speaker at GeckoCon 2021, Crypto Art Week Asia 2021, NFT Summit 2021, NEARCon Alpha 2021 and more. He also was a featured performer at the first-ever music festival in Decentraland, Metaverse Music Festival in 2021.