Blockchain adoption: even if you do a lot of things right, you can still be wrong

Transcript

[music] Hey, hi everyone. Thank you for coming to our talk. Um, it it is based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Republic of the Marshall Islands just last year. In 2025, the Republic began distributing universal income through USDM1, which is a sovereign digital bond issued Stellar blockchain. But before we take you to the islands, let's refresh how to do proper human centric UX. Very very simplified. These are the things that are very important.

First, we need to keep the local context in mind. And it is very often forgotten in the blockchain deployments. For example, how do people manage money today? Then we have participation. Who designs the project and based of which data? Then the testing. Do people understand how to use the product that we're building for them? And finally support. We do not want to just build something and forget about it. Uh so this talk is taking us into the middle of Pacific Ocean. The Republic of the Marshall Islands, 29 atals and five islands with communities spread across 2.1 million square kilometers of ocean. The population as of 2025 is roughly 36,000 people. Cash is being transported to the outer

islands and its population by ship. Uh but the republic also has a history of being a testing ground for the United States. Between 1946 and 1958, there were 67 nuclear warheads detonated in the islands. Regardless of this fact, the republic still entered the compact of free association with the United States, which for them means there is ongoing military presence and the circulation of the US dollar. So in this historical context, the minister of the republic assesses their situation like this. We have been bombed, right? Our people have died because of the nuclear testing. So nothing deters us from charting our course as a country because no one is actually coming to our aid

except us. That's why we're doing all these innovative things. In 1988, the Marshalise took their fate into their own hands. Shortly after gaining independence, they created the maritime registry for vessel and corporate registration. 30 years later, the registry is by volume one of the three largest maritime registries um globally. And this experience and expertise enabled the Marshall government to engage with promoters of the first sovereign backed

cryptocurrency in 2018. While this project eventually did not proceed, it led to engaging with another promoter um who put forth the idea of a more contested or controversial project enga relating to blockchain within the Marshall Islands. So the Ranglab atal special administrative region eventually caused a constitutional crisis and political turmoil and ended by the apprehension of the promoter of Razar um by the US government on fraud charges.

Against this backdrop, in 2022, the RMI government um collaborated with a US-based team to set up a registry for DAO LLC's. So giving decentralized autonomous organizations legal entity status and also create a registered agent which would allow these Dows to pay fees for registration which already created some contributions back to the Marshall annual budget. Um since its inception we're talking about roughly $100,000 US.

Now they also allowed and enabled the creation of USDM1 and a financial inclusion wrapper, the Lomalo wallet, which you can see here on the right, the Lomalo wallet and its user interface. On the left hand side, you see local newspaper reporting on it. But the core issue is that when it was launched, like the attendees of the launch event were mainly organizers and bell toados. So the privileged group um within the Marsh Islands were not target. Arguably one of the reasons for this is the concentration of um personnel and personal overlap between USDM1 Lomalo

and Maidal. So you can see the Maido directory services offices in Majo um in the center. So you know what makes sense about this is that the Marsha ions can do away with the um cash dependencies so they don't have to ship cash um but also end the dependence on commercial correspondent banking really adding another layer that connects them to the international financial system. But we also have to keep in mind that >> so against this u against this background and the UX primer that we had in the beginning there are some things

that still should be improved. Local mathematics teachers said they indigenous communities the male don't know how to protect themselves when technology like this is introduced. So what we have is that the speed of blockchain introduction does not actually meet the actual needs of the people there. There is limited education and hence very limited usage of the app that was built for the local population. There was limited training and the teams are mostly based in the US. So there's also lack in digital skills where which were already there when the internet connectivity was introduced to the islands and then you add blockchain you add another layer of complexity and people who just recently got online are asked to transact onchain and this without really being explained why or

how. So when we when we think about blockchain adoption, I think we as a community need to turn our hats, turn it upside down and really instead of, you know, thinking blockchain first, we need to empower and engage with local communities, think critically about how to do it and what their needs are, how we can not just take them along, but really put them in the driver's seat of blockchain adoption. to start this conversation, reach out to us um after the talk. I don't think we have time for questions. Um or hit us up on Signal. Thank you very much.

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