About the room
The official registered business name is Cortex Compass. The business was established in 2019.
Haeun Park registered the name in the Republic of Korea and opened a rented room on Gamaksan-ro in Jeokseong-myeon, Paju-si, Gyeonggi, so local readers would share one shelf of primers on decentralized finance basics.
Haeun Park
Founder and lead reader. She spent earlier years in branch operations at a regional bank in Gyeonggi, reconciling what a customer thought a transfer did with what the branch record showed. She leads circle weeks on keys, swaps, and public pages, and she keeps the shelf order and the kettle.
Minjae Cho
Facilitator since 2022. He studied economics in Seoul and does contract bookkeeping on other days. In the circle he leads liquidity, lending, and stablecoins. When a Solana program changes a published ratio, he rewrites the margin note and dates it.
A short history
In 2019 the first shelves held a thin glossary and a stack of English notes. Readers were already arriving with questions about swaps and stablecoins, and Solana programs became the worked examples because those were the public pages people brought up by name. Café tables nearby had no shared binder and no rule about phones.
Through 2020 the shelf split into separate binders for swaps, pools, lending, and peg notes. In 2021 the Foundations Circle started, after drop-in visitors asked to begin from the same page rather than joining mid-chapter. Minjae Cho joined in 2022. In 2024 the room added the half-day club briefing for groups that could not keep six Tuesdays.
How a session is run
Paper comes first. A public program page is used only when the week calls for it, and then as a printed excerpt with the copy date in the corner. The opening reading is quiet. Holdings, balances, and personal positions are left unspoken. Eight chairs are the cap so one question can travel the whole table.
Both facilitators teach from published documents. Readers who want personal financial advice bring their own licensed advisor. The room’s work is the vocabulary and the habit of finding the fee, the ratio, and the date on a page.
What the room keeps
The furniture that matters is a wall of binders, eight chairs, coat hooks, and a kettle. Sessions run in English. The door is closed on Sunday, Monday, Seollal, and Chuseok. A fuller picture of the shelves is on the reading room page.