How former football prodigy Will Mellors-Blair turned his love of systems, data, and challenge into Mindora, a Web3 platform rewarding personal and professional performance through AI and blockchain.
Will Mellors-Blair never saw football as just a game. He saw geometry. Space. Time. “Mathematics was my first love,” he says. “Football came later, and I only really got into it because I was fascinated by how the game unfolded like a living equation.”
That love for patterns began in the playground, where young Will watched players move and mapped their choices in his mind. “It was like chess,” he explains. “I’d think five steps ahead. Position myself. Score or assist. I was building a system in my head without even realising.”
That system led him from a local club in Nottingham to being scouted by Manchester United. But football was never the destination. It was just the first field where he trained his brain.
He tested at a 141 IQ by age 14. In school, he was always ahead: secondary school work in primary, college-level courses in secondary. “By the time I got to university, I found it quite easy,” he says. That university was the University of Michigan, one of the top academic institutions in the world, where he graduated with a 3.91 GPA and a portfolio that included quantum computing, biotech, and computational neuroscience.
“I’ve always looked for challenge,” Mellors-Blair says. “That’s what drew me toward solving complex problems, particularly in health, wellbeing, and performance.”
Back in the UK, his intellect caught the attention of national institutions. The government brought him in to design mathematical models for public health. From there, he worked with the NHS, Public Health England, WHO, UN, and tech giants like Google and Salesforce.
“That’s where the idea for Mindora began,” he says. “I could see the same problem everywhere: human potential was under-utilised, and data was fragmented.”
Mindora is Mellors-Blair’s answer to that problem. A platform that integrates personal and organisational data to deliver performance insights using AI and Web3 to reward health, wellbeing, and productivity.
The vision dates back to 2016. “I asked my mum if I could use the living room window as a whiteboard,” he says. “The bedroom walls were already covered. I wrote out my theories, models, infrastructure ideas, every morning. It became my lab.”
That early vision became clearer after the pandemic. “More data. More silos. More burnout. It only strengthened the need for a system like Mindora.”
In 2023, Mellors-Blair began to package his research into a pitch deck. He didn’t need long to validate it. Monica Pool Knox, former CHRO of Microsoft, Sony, and Twitter, was one of the first investors. “She told me, ‘Will, the energy of your message told me I needed to respond.’”
With backing secured, Mindora started building. They met with companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, McDonald’s, and General Motors. “We sat down with their HR leads, asked them where the bottlenecks were, and found that the same pain points kept coming up, productivity issues, wellbeing gaps, and siloed data.”
The solution? A platform that connects the dots. For companies, that means linking systems like Oracle, Asana, Slack, and Aviva to identify team-level performance insights. For individuals, it’s syncing tools like Apple Health, Google Fit, and work calendars to build a personalised dashboard.
“We believe people should be rewarded for good performance,” says Mellors-Blair. “That includes health, wellbeing, and output. Just like you get paid a salary, you should also get rewarded for showing up as your best self.”
Mindora is building that incentive layer using blockchain. Verified data generates a performance score. That score earns $MIND tokens, a utility token designed to reward healthy habits and consistent productivity.
“We’re not asking people to change behaviour,” he says. “Just sync your apps. The AI does the rest. You get personalised insights. If you meet the thresholds, you get rewarded. It’s entirely passive.”
When asked how to describe Mindora, Will draws a line from the movement economy to what he calls the performance economy. “Sweatcoin rewarded steps. We reward performance. Because it’s not just about how much you move. It’s whether you’re thriving.”
Mindora is built on a core innovation called the Proof of Performance protocol. It measures personal improvement using biometric and behavioural data from devices like smartphones and wearables. The system tracks things like step count, sleep consistency, heart rate variability, mood, and even screen time. The more you improve based on your own personal baseline, the more rewards you earn.
“It’s not about outperforming others. It’s about outperforming yourself,” says Mellors-Blair. Users are not compared to each other. Instead, the algorithm looks at personal progress. This means someone improving their daily steps from 2,000 to 3,000 is just as valued as someone going from 8,000 to 9,000. It’s a performance protocol designed around fairness and self-improvement.
To keep the system private and secure, Mindora stores user data off-chain in encrypted personal vaults. Every improvement is proven using zero-knowledge proofs, a method that verifies the outcome without exposing the raw data. “The protocol never sees your health logs or mood scores,” Mellors-Blair explains. “It only verifies that you’ve met the improvement criteria.”
This verified improvement then triggers an on-chain attestation, a digital certificate that confirms the user achieved a specific goal. That attestation unlocks $MIND tokens, which can be staked for more rewards or burned for perks like digital badges, premium content, or real-world discounts from brand partners.
“We’ve designed it as a cycle,” Mellors-Blair says. “You improve. You earn. You reinvest. It creates a feedback loop of positive behaviour and long-term engagement.”
Mindora’s system also supports staking, where users can lock tokens for a period of time to boost their future earnings. “It’s about commitment. The more committed you are to your progress, the more the protocol recognises that.”
Privacy, Mellors-Blair notes, is foundational. “We’re not building a surveillance tool. We’re building an empowerment tool. Users own their data. They choose what to share and when. Everything else is cryptographically verified.”
He’s clear-eyed about the future. “Our Proof of Performance protocol is scalable. It can apply to anyone, anywhere. We’re not just building software. We’re building a new standard for how performance is measured and rewarded.”
Mellors-Blair may have left football behind, but he’s still playing chess — just on a much bigger board.
