Applications for the Developing World

Transcript

morning everyone thanks for thanks for joining nicole uh any talk today so really what this talk is today is to kind of introduce you guys to what i've been doing over the last two years and if you are looking at getting into like that more sustainable development fulfilling work work that isn't really like too much into the d5 space and looking at investing into developing markets this is a unique introspect into the caribbean blockchain ecosystem and what we're trying to do over there so i'm mark pereira originally from

trinidad and tobago and i was born there and originally before leaving trinidad one of my teachers told me she says don't go away and be one of the numbers that contributes to brain drain and that was a core part of me that kind of left me so when i went to sydney australia to study i studied robotics engineering and then ended up going into web development luckily enough i got into the blockchain ecosystem and that's where i began my startup journey and really um most people know me for this project alice which was a crypto wallet aimed at being like the super app of crypto really what we're trying to do is make

mobile blockchain development as easy as possible because the mobile blockchain ecosystem is is completely underdeveloped in the web 3 ecosystem and we just thought that we could if we made it easier more people will come but it was my first startup i made a lot of mistakes and i learned a lot along the way and um because i learned a lot along the way i built up this knowledge to do blockchain consulting and build blockchain applications for some of these guys um some of the big names out there which i'm like incredibly humble to say that we have worked alongside some of the most talented and awesome minds in ux in the ux space uh also some core ethereum teams

uh and currently we're building out the non-custodial wallet for the flow blockchain ecosystem um so after doing all of this working in the in the web3 space and basically burning out after alice i kind of settled back in in my country in trinidad and realized that my people the people of my country are the people who need this technology the most and i really just dug deep into the core of what uh my country needed and i moved back into what you would call the bush in trinidad i really so i we got this cabin in the middle of

trinidad kind of nestled in this like really cool ecosystem and within this ecosystem there's a lot of permaculture development farms so it is awesome communities of people who are living like the most sustainable life you could put you could possibly think of and i'm going to introduce you to a few of these people to just kind of show you the the work that's being done like outside of the tech space but also super innovative so what we have here is this wasa maki ecosystems and they begin to permaculture they do everything from like aquaponics and centripe beds and basically self-sustained living and farm to table

so uh malia here and her father earl uh both run the farm and malia went to blue hill in new york so she's a fully qualified chef and everything that they grow on the farm they then um take that produce and they either sell it they sell flowers they sell bananas and then they also sell loud lollies so loud lollies is a fruit that's fully vegan no sugar no preservatives and you actually feel good after you these ice creams um so these are some people that were in this area in trinidad but they didn't have access to pay months trinidad actually doesn't have an mp so or they don't have some digital payment

solution so this is where crypto for me really started making a lot of sense and another another place is this another permaculture farm called kook farm in trinidad and here we have like the next generation of innovative agriculturalists growing up this is elena she's the daughter of matthew and brittany in in the cook farm and you can see here like this is a young ecosystem but they they're also innovative thinkers and still they don't have access for people in the in the main city in trinidad to be able to pay them because they're out

in in the bush so to get money to them is a lot hard because um a lot harder to do and they actually have to make treks from it's a 45 minute drive to go up into the city and deliver all of their produce so they're selling right now eggs and taking it up but they don't have the assurance that they're going to get that cash or that check when um when they are making the deliverables and and having to take the time out of their busy life like running an entire permaculture farm to then go into town and take their payments um and really at the heart of it all uh this is people that are super dear to my heart rory and bunci o'connor

and they they really paved the way for permaculture in trinidad and tobago and it is really awesome couple it's like a dynamic duo amazing people so bunty is the artist she has these really delicate hands and can mold things with clay in a way that you know it's like she's been doing it for like 20 years and they they ran a pottery farm that was exporting products all throughout the caribbean and bunty does the kind of malleable fragile stuff and then rory comes in and he handles all of the uh the kiln and heating of the of the pottery

and basically all of the hard labor and he's also a really good carpenter and a wood woodworker um so they also have this problem where people come to see them on the the pottery farm but they don't have cash or they don't have something in their pockets to basically pay them but if they had some access to some sort of payment rail where they could go to the caribbean or they could go to their uh pottery estate and pay them very easily then it would make a lot more sense for them to run a very viable business so all is to say like where where is this happening so

this is trinidad and tobago here and the this if you if you guys don't know where the caribbean is a lot of people ask me where is the caribbean um so it's in between north america so you see miami top there central america and south america and a lot of you will know jamaica you'll hear the accents from jamaica barbados but um nestled right next to venezuela is trinidad and tobago and it's a really interesting place because we have all of the kind of geopolitical problems that you would get being next to venezuela we have a lot of migrants that come in so when you start looking at an outwards perspective an outsider's perspective at

what's going on in trinidad there's a lot to unfold and a lot to dig into because culturally it's really rich we have such awesome story uh some like folklores we have a lot really awesome music music that's listened to throughout the entire caribbean we have and then we have all of the problems of corruption we have massive inequality we we have migrants and refugees coming in from venezuela so when you really dig into it there's a lot of interesting problems to work on in in trinidad and tobago and the wider caribbean

so when you start looking at the numbers like why would you want to get into the caribbean market the gdp of our accessible market is around 150 to 200 billion dollars this if you want to put it into scale is about half the gdp of nigeria and about double i think of kenya um and when you dig further into like why because i do feel like this is a smallish market for the potential of the caribbean the caribbean import 85 of all of their food produce so when you start thinking about how much you're actually exporting it's a very minute amount and they're kind of like held by

this westernized idea of consumerism whereas they have all the resources there to export a lot of their goods and i know we've seen singapore do it in over next to malaysia so when you also dig into more numbers and see like basically the finance gap how much people are applying for loans and can't get access to it 1.4 of the loans that are applied for in in the caribbean market are fulfilled so that leaves a 98.6 percent gap in developing in in the caribbean for predatory lending for higher purchase

sales for also for a lot of venture capitalists to come in and say okay well where where do i put my money because uh when you start looking at like putting your money into the developing world there's a lot of incentive to do it because and when you think about the caribbean market as well you think a lot about msmes msmes are like what is really driving forward the caribbean at the moment they're the innovative thinkers they're the young tech savvy entrepreneurs and in the emerging markets the share of the gdp for companies that are classified as emerging markets

it's 55 57 to msmes compared to the developing markets you know like silicon valley san francisco um and then the average gdp growth being pushed by msmes now this gets super interesting because it's 4.1 so you can really see like innovative thinkers and and tech entrepreneurs are driving for the economies in emerging markets but the equity market cap so most people are looking at investing in a delaware c corp or some sort of silicon valley startup that has a lot of promise but when you look at emerging markets you're like you're seven times more likely to get that 10x return on your investment

so i think this is a really awesome statistics by a friend who's working on a project called turbo which is basically tokenizing equity and then putting it out there so that outside investors can invest into invest into the developing markets so i'm going to go into a quick dive into what we've done with uh zed labs and basically how we are trying to lay a fertile ground fertile soil um for a lot of other younger entrepreneurs in trinidad to grow from um we've been you know extremely privileged to work in a crypto ecosystem and experience the benefits of you know

these massive spikes in currencies and really what we're doing is reinvesting all of this money back into our local ecosystem um a part of that you um a part of that is education um so we're all technologists and we all know the boot camp model and how that that's basically a very high throughput way of getting technologists out there into this space so we're our first cohort of mvps as we call them um they're a part of the mvp program and what we're trying to do is instill them with the minimum viable programmer mindset so that once they're in an organization

they can go all the way through and become the most valuable players in their organization um and they've just finished their their first section of the course um which is html and css and then we're moving them into javascript and then once in java it's really about kind of like visual feedback and we want them to get as much visual feedback as possible so we do them we start them off with front-end languages and then as you get into javascript you know you can build anything with javascript a mobile phone iot back-end server desktop applications so it's really about like picking your path with javascript and seeing where you want to drill into and we do encourage them to get as deep as possible

and we do a lot of pro bono work this project is very interesting um it's called wildflower and i wonder so basically wildflower is this idea where um a local entrepreneur who is really big into pushing msmes she's an awesome woman and yeah young she won project runway represented us as miss universe and now works on empowering msmes and getting their products into like local supermarkets whereas if they had a small product before it couldn't get into supermarkets so she's made it as easy as possible to get in there but she's also um also pushes women rights a lot in

trinidad which is a very misogynistic which is a very misogynistic country and very patriarchal so what me and anya have done is is teamed up on this project which has a lot of the crypto community in trinidad uh teaming up on it and just really pushing this feminine vibe out there and the matriarch and pushing all of our educational content in it because a lot of people want to learn about crypto so if they want to learn about something so bad like let's drag them into this like matriarchal tao that um basically gets people kind of like going against the traditional norms so this is um one of our first events we had it's called

wallet and wine and this is our the first nft with wildflower which is a really amazing project because that the person in the bottom right to the screen is a reggae dancer artist out of jamaica who added her song to the nft in a loop and she needed and he wanted to pay her in crypto so we had to set up a wallet for her and then basically we just did this big event around it where we know we a lot of people wanted to learn about um setting up their crypto wallet so we made it a big thing and since that i think we had like about 40 community members join into the chat and flow in men and women

so i it's it's working these ideals that we have are actually bringing people in to this new world that we're trying to create over in trinidad and tobago and the wider caribbean so this is a little more ad hoc but we offer an over-the-counter exchange that just moved one million u.s dollars in the last six months last month um for an ad hoc exchange i think it's doing really well but it's really just to meet the demand for people uh who want to get into the crypto space so we trade cash for crypto um and basically the income that we get from these companies that we work for like dapa labs currently we then trade

that crypto with the local market to pay salaries for the locals that are working on these products um and last but not least we have our product um you know we're a software development agency so we we solve problems with software and our premier product in trinidad is wam and what wham is it's just a really simplified crypto wallet with nice ux and we aim to basically make it as simple as possible for people to grasp the idea of digital money and to go from cash to crypto as simple as possible and then when they do go from cash to crypto

um then we like we meet the demand with the software that we build but we try to make it as seamless as possible because people in equip in in trinidad or the caribbean ecosystem they don't know about defy trad 5 c5 like dowels all this stuff goes right over their head but when you put it in their hands and you say okay this is equal to one trinidadian dollar and you can send it to your friends very easily and you can send payment links over social channels then it just becomes a lot more palatable to them and once we build out these financial rails with people who have these wallets in their hands that then gives us the opportunity to start filtering money like and offering

tokenized equity into maybe startups have more visuals into their um spending and then provide like a good micro lending platform and that's pretty much what's next is just financial empowerment and financial inclusion i'm a little over time so i want to thank you guys for listening and um yeah if you want to get into the developing markets uh come and give give me a shout thank you [Applause]