Building Through Constraints: A Decade of Web3 in Iran

Transcript

[music] [music] Hello everyone. Do you hear me on the mic? Yes. Okay, cool. You have the clicker. Um, thanks for being here so early and so numerous. Um, to hear us talk about web 3 in Iran over the past decade. I'm Fatime. I'm a Iranian Swiss lawyer. I practice law in Switzerland, work in crypto for the past 10 years. And here is Cheyenne. >> Hello. Hello. Hi.

Is it on? >> Hello. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Um, I'm Cheyenne. Um, I'm more of a educator. I'm teaching blockchain for the last 10 years. Um, in Farsy, English, now a bit of Portuguese, not that much. Um, and I'm more coming from information security and being a hacker to more internet freedom activist these days. So um before delving really into into the talk there's more more a discussion um I want to invite everyone to go on Mircat ask question make comments and um also share your experiences if you have any related to web 3 and Iran specifically but also anything else that would be kind of um analogous to the

struggle that we're going to talk about here. Um when we thought of the session, I thought this would be a discussion about resilience and some fun facts about a um kind of micro community in the big world of crypto and Ethereum. Um and then I realized it's also a story of uh grief and loss and a lot of hope. So uh let's get to it. Iran is a country in the Middle East um around 100 million population um has been going through one of the world's economic sanctions in the world um for a lot of years which means that it has been cut off from

international financial and banking systems. So you cannot kind of transact in and out of Iran the way you would do um anywhere anywhere else in the west or in the world that is not under sanctions. Um there was kind of a relief from sanctions for a couple of years uh and then started again and now we're seeing kind of peak sanctions but also peak isolation um after the war that started around a year and a half ago and given that on top of not being able to transact um maybe we can go in the next slide you know having one of the worst uh passport in the world um one of the worst inflation hyperinflation in the

world just right after Venezuela uh one of the worst internet freedom and now there are not even like airplanes really flying in and out of Iran. So yeah, a lot of isolation while it has also a lot of natural resources which means cheap energy um and the need really for crypto given all of that I said before. So a lot of have quite high um rate of crypto penetration in the country. Um just one thing for this talk we have around like three days of content to talk about but we have 20 minutes so but we just want to tell you some of the stories that we basically went through.

Um and so this is a post from a decade ago 2012 that basically the Persian community like Farsc content started to exist about blockchain and bitcoin. Um and this is um in bitcoin talk.org oric which is like one of the oldest forums on around like crypto that there's a call to action is like whoever wants to talk come join us let's talk and a lot of communities started from this post um I just want to go really fast to like some of the things that started and still continues so coinon is um this website it's nonprofit it's all about education and far um content that created in 2014 still goes on um we even had like a children's book to translate

it for like about Bitcoin. So many other things it exists. It's one of the main sources that still exists and a lot of people got on boarded from here. Um another one is Shia podcast which means header tails. Um this is a podcast I started with some of the friends. Basically the idea was like we had back then there was no discord yet. There was mumble which was this software people were using for basic gamers. We were gathering there permissionless open to anyone that can talk Farscy basically uh join in discuss what this new technology is. Um and then it grew into being that this podcast we had like agendas and we've been called we do show like scientific showoff which is like technical discussions. So it's about

protocol about how everything works and we there's around more than 40 40 or 50 episodes all technical. Um there are some sociological episodes too and um yeah so we can go ahead. Um should I continue with this? Okay. Um another thing that I'm really proud of is this um basic creation of this group called women in blockchain Iran. Uh which we basically sponsored seven Iranian women to join consensus academy do a whole boot camp. We mentored them and they created this group called women in blockchain um to teach and create a group of like entrepreneurship um and for like Farsy speakers inside Iran to be able to like sustain themselves um by

teaching and other ways of like creating like doing audits and other thing to create a whole ecosystem for them all run by Iranian women. Uh this was like one of the peak moments of like excitement. there was like a lot of a lot going on and um then things start to slow down and get pretty weird. Um I can continue this. Yeah. >> Yeah, you can. I mean um you've given many talks actually on this specific topic. So if anyone is interested about the the details of um kind of these specific bumps in the road that that the Iranian community has seen within Ethereum specifically and crypto. I mean you can maybe like

>> yeah I'll go through go through that pretty fast. So basically after the women in blockchain Iran was a successful project we were able to like sponsor around like 65 other Iranians or far speakers to join consensus academy and it's cons academy was like this really intense 3 months long boot camp um and they joined we were mentoring them had weekly calls around two weeks before the course ended um a lot of like Iranians basically the people that in their forum selected Iran as the country and um got an email that due to uh cautionary reasons for sanctions. We won't we can't um continue this course with you. They already had their projects. They already almost finished.

So basically they kicked out all those people out of the consensus academy which is like there was no mon monetary transaction. It was just education. Um it was a pretty hard time uh to like figure out what's going on. Um and basically we decided to women in blockchain Farsc Iran decided to open source all the content try to take these students and continue. We lost almost more than 60% of those students. They never came back to this space. Um the others we continued with them. We open sourced our content which uh we show in a bit but um then we were like put grants out there for the Gitcoin and others. Then also they got kicked out of the grant platforms cautionary reasons um for sanctions and there was like a

lot of things like metam master geob blocking IP addresses and people were messaging us that my wallet is suddenly showing zero like what happened and it was my life saving and it was just because their IP was being blocked. >> Yeah. I mean 2021 2022 was really the years where I think the illusion kind of shattered that that crypto is not about full inclusion. It's not necessarily I mean it is decentralized and per permissionless and censorship resistant but when uh you go beyond kind of that base protocol layer and humans are involved and organizations are involved or you know someone is operating or like updating that that wallet then they have kind of a say and they decided at this

point to choose to be very conservative and not allow basically Iranians to be part of just like education educational programs or like the MetaMask wallet you mentioned there were also other incidents with open C and so on um just also based on on very superficial screening if the IP was from Iran or or some other metrics kind of so um that's where we realized okay there is less difference between crypto and the kind of traditional under sanctioned financial system that maybe I had hoped uh that there was >> uh and being Iranian growing up in Iran and a lot we all know that hitting a

wall is a everyday event. So we just continued we open sourced the uh the courses we did two online boot camps we got thousands of people on boarded in the space or actually learning what crypto is. Uh I remember there was like two main cases. One was like a teacher from a small town that she really wanted to do a boot camp but she didn't have enough time and money to join in. So we gave everything for free to her to teach to her class in that small town. One of actually our instructor um she she's she's a mom. She has like two kids um and she's from a small town. She became like the these almost muse for a lot of women in small towns that they don't need to go to a

big town or go outside or have money. They can just have internet and start making money for their family which was like really inspir inspiring. I mean that was kind of like the golden age of of uh crypto at least as a as a cute community I think like a lot of people were working anon you could just join project if you were good enough or if you vibed well with with the with the project or the team uh they would pay you in crypto so a lot of people actually started getting jobs and money when they wouldn't have been able otherwise so no one cared if you were from Iran no one cared if you were from a village No one cared if you were doing that, you know, as a like in your spare

time or after like putting your kids into bed. So, it was really an enabler of of freedom and more kind of agency and autonomy. And then it became harder and harder for like various reason. I think we're all kind of more or less aware. Um, but still Iranians were working in this space and we're involved and I think yeah, we're we're here now. um 2025 2026 was kind of uh a really dark age for Iranians in crypto and dark because there was a a to total full communication blackout for a couple of months. So um there was no internet at all but on other than no internet there was also no way to call in and out of

the country. Um and these had I mean many many impacts on on on personally for people who couldn't be in touch anymore with with their dear ones abroad or vice versa but also people who worked uh within an international ecosystem where I also um kind of harmed the most in this um and specifically in web 3. We have many accounts of um of of kind of how this impacted Iranians. I don't know if you want to develop some of the points.

>> Yeah. So there are so many stories I can tell about this and I want to but just time a few ones is like well we always especially for the technicals in the crowd like we talk about mining versus staking like the differences. One thing that I realized is like some differences we never talked about like let's say internet shutdowns especially short periods a lot of people that were doing mining they open their hardware they start cleaning them dust dusting them like organizing their server racks um they were okay for stakers when internet shutdown happened they were just going nuts they couldn't do anything they were and they were just hoping that the internet comes back before the inactivity leak kicks kicks in and they start losing money uh not just losing profit actually losing their money so

that was one of the big things we realized, oh wow, staking and mining has a big difference in some cases. Um, or some other was like around grants that there were like these groups that worked for months to create these prototype of software. They did like everything in the grants and community calls to be able to get the grant and they got the grant and then finally at the end they were they had to like present to the ecosystem when internet went down and they couldn't come online for a few weeks. They came online, they presented their work, but then the basically ecosystem were saying, well, we don't know if you can deliver on your promises with the with this internet. So, they kind of cancelled the grants. There like these these um stories and also so many stories of people going to neighboring

countries to be able to like join a meeting. So, imagine like you have to like drive for like hours and past the border, land border to be able to like have internet, join a call, come back. And we know some people that actually went with a backpack and migrated after that. They couldn't really go back and they continued to stay outside. Uh there are so many stories. Come find us after. We can tell you any a lot of stories um here and there. >> Yeah. I mean fun fact like a lot of people were like mining crypto in Iran like from like couple of years ago it was very popular. Energy is cheap like they were doing it. Uh now they dur during the international shutdown they were just like cleaning and dusting off

their hardware. Um and um yeah so next slide um this everyone is so proud Ethereum has never gone down 100% uptime. You can go to ethereum uptime.com to make sure that it's true. Um, I mean this is definitely like a very core to blockchain and Ethereum, but if you are in Iran during an internet shutdown, I mean, Ethereum is 100% down for you. And this lasted a really long time where if you had any crypto in your wallet then I mean you may as well just had lost it or never had it in the first place which is kind

of extremely problematic if you're hedging against hyperinflation by like owning some stable coins for instance which a lot of people did like it's extremely common to have at least USDT maybe on Tron but also on other chains and um yeah and then all of a sudden they didn't know if they had it. Imagine if you have to manage it like upgrade it whatever you need to do move uh the assets to another wallet or whatever none of this was accessible to you. [gasps] >> Um yeah so one thing maybe I can show the next slide and then come back to this. So uh for those that have been in the space maybe you've seen that like

defcon stumble was like one of the peak Iranian presence in the crowd. There were like so many people here in there. Bangkok was we had around more than I think 40 or 50 volunteers from Iran or some big numbers like 15 or something big numbers that were volunteering defconnect. Argentina also but where are the Iranians now? like there are not that many and it's um it's kind of like using this I'm going to use this method um model called leaky pip pipelines that usually were used before in academia for women in engineering that like there are so many layers that they keep dropping and then they don't get at the end so similar to this was like a lot of web three projects are rejecting Iranians we

told you about some of the stories but then KYC and geob blocking made a lot of other leave or never enter. Like I know a lot of like friends that are students in Canada or Europe uh and they want to buy some crypto either for hedging on inflation or sending money to their families but because the only official ID they have is union passport they the third party KYCs would just reject them as like a risky users but they're living in Europe they're living in Canada they should not be rejected in that sense um in Iran there was like a lot of crackdowns on miners and startups and the other thing is also Iran government kind of took over this whole mining narrative that like Iranian government is doing mining. So a lot of them went into under these questions that who's

mining exactly and the final straw was the internet shutdowns that resulted in people thinking which was kind of sass saying that like oh IT jobs are unstable like I don't want to work in IT or being developer because it's unstable and to us it's kind of weird sounding cuz most of us talk about like as long as you have internet you have a stable job well you don't have internet so you don't have a stable job and it was pretty sad. sad to see people went through this whole cycles through a few years. Um and especially like now I'm really happy that we got this um space to talk about it. I have another talk at 12 about mother of all VPNs which is accessibility. I'm so happy that we can tell these stories but for a while

people were really isolated. They couldn't really tell their stories. They were even offline. Um I don't know if you want to add things here or um Okay, we can go to >> Yes. So I mean as you mentioned there was there were going to be many actually hackers from Iran at Defcon and they usually come for Defcon and it global too. Um but this year they're really missed and not many of them very very few of them like a handful are here. Um this is due to kind of complications in getting visas but also to really the diff difficulties regarding travels and and how to fly out of Iran and then fly um to Mumbai and and also very costly.

So um I mean they are definitely missed. Uh but it's not only them like all of the kind of communities that want to be here and that cannot for whatever like either it's passports or financial I think I mean to me they're missed because this event is is for everyone and that's kind of the the beauty of it. Um I want to go really quickly through the last slide and I've seen we have many questions actually. Um and and we can talk about I mean what we want to talk through the questions as well. Um but to to end the presentation uh I would like to hyperstition kind of a future we wanna or I would like to see and I think many can agree um and and

that crypto and ethereum can also facilitate and enable um and that's one where we have tools that kind of bypass any form of internet shutdowns or borders or KYC's or um that kind of enable inclusion and agency and sovereignty And these are like very practical tools as well like would be borderless connectivity for one so that if someone decide to shut down your internet or for whatever reason you lose connection you can still check your wallet. Another one would be uh the ability to transact offline um or to be able to sign transactions offline um and there are I don't know if you want to

mention some others and then I'm going to read through the mircat questions. Um yeah, so a lot of these we talk about like Iran situation, but they're so close to your situation too that you don't know till it happens to you and that's too late. Uh one of the things is like the offline transactions we have um like situations that people uh the banks and everything are shut down for any reason. They're in a grocery market of their neighborhood. They have USDT. The guy is okay to accept USDT, but they can't. And it's kind of sad that we have the tech right now to do like $5 transaction there. Um so that's one of the things I'm also passionate to like make it happen. Um the internet is a whole different topic that um at 12 we

can talk and like overall I'm down to talk about it if you have solutions or concerns and you want to talk. Um yeah, we can go to the questions and >> um Okay. Oh, great. Um so okay we we heard we love you and the Iranian people how can this community help. Um other than building for inclusion I think uh one thing that would like go a long way is not to over comply like if you think that you don't be overconervative with your risk. So if you are uh having to make a decision whether or not you include or exclude a particular population from your your product then maybe lean on the side of let's include

and kind of manage the risk rather than just avoid it all together. Uh just one thing I want to add there was like we saw in 2021 that a lot of companies start kicking out I uranian users and that's one of the reasons back then we started something called Iran Unchained which was this DAO and a legal legal work and we took away this taboo that like Iranian users are just don't touch them. We're like if two kids two Iranian kids can figure out how to do this legally your legal team can do that. So push back on these like no to Iranians and they try to like make include them.

Um >> I mean this question do devs need to blog Iranian students? I think we partially answered this uh like I ideally no and like if if you really do need to you can always not do it. Find a way to um like you know there are bad actors and then they are just Iranians. So make sure to to have kind of some discernment there. Um just one thing I say like the idea of like users versus and Iranian users you have to remove this mindset. It's like users like just forget where they are from like why um we did this thing in Denver that I was I put a bunch of jewelry for people to like be able to donate and buy and had a QR with the Ethereum address and on

there I said like the private key of this address is located in and then long longitudinal latitude. No one really cared even though that long time that was tan and people paid and moved on like they didn't care where that private key is. So that mindset like users you don't really need to know where they are from like or act on it. >> We have two minutes. I want to try to answer all of the questions. Okay, great. What is the status of offline transactions in Iran? >> Non-existence. How has the war affected Iran's crypto community and how has crypto helped people preserve their savings or move money despite restrictions and bans? Um so war didn't affect as much as the

internet shutdown did and uh but because the whole country become became like militarized there is there used to be like almost monthly meetups now they're resuming again uh thanks to the community there and a lot of people that we in touch with directly and they're missed here they used to be here all the time um but um it got pretty intense and there they came online for a bit and was but online also doesn't exist but there were like internal forums and things that started that I don't have access to but it's inside Iran that they exist and a lot of people are crypto is still one of the only ways you could save other than like dollar bills under your blanket. Um so yeah >> are Iranians able to buy crypto? Yes, everywhere all the time. Like it's it's

very easy to buy crypto >> but the problem is like when the crypto exchange Iranian crypto exchange gets sanctioned all their addresses becomes like tainted. But we should be do better. We should be able to like def say here's a individual doing this and doing like of a transaction versus someone actually doing money laundering. We're good at that. Chain analysis exists. There is like we're good at this. So let's just use them for good rather than just um >> is running block validators also blocked. >> You need internet for that. Yes, it's not blocked but you need internet for that. And there's like some block builders that do offac compliance which is okay for a lot of things because there those addresses are not in the smart contract blacklist but um yeah you

need internet still. >> What is crypto used for in Iran? Internal payment, external payment. I think both and especially just storage of like storing your assets savings. um how much of the blockchain and crypto education in Iran included censorship resistance from first principles. >> So growing up in Iran like even a 5-year-old knows what a VPN is. So the censorship is something you deal with every day from like the movie you watch and you feel like those are brother and sister and later on you grow up you realize the word lovers. Um that's a censorship we had and then also like the internet is always censored. So that is

part of it and the education is one of the things that people realize is like for me myself like when I heard about Bitcoin early on it was like it's too good to be true it can't work and I took six months trying to break it and I realized oh it works and it broke me and I changed my topic from Linux security to Bitcoin and a lot of others so that comes in naturally to a lot of people they understand it right away. We're out of time. >> [music]