Onboarding 1 million people into crypto in Latam

Transcript

okay hello everybody i am paulo savadela from argentina from diva education and today i'm going to tell you a little bit about what we are doing to onboard 1 million people into crypto in latin america and why i think that's important so we are going to talk a little bit about the problems i see the opportunity we have how we are solving it how it's going and how you can join us so some of the problems we see mainly to start in latin america we have a high unemployment we have a low institutional quality and high corruption people don't believe in institutions don't believe in banks don't believe in the government there's justice nothing we have very unstable economy for

example in argentina we have more than 80 percent year inflation this year and our currency has lost more than 99 percent of its value in the last 10 years we've had constant evaluations we have savings and asset confiscations capital flow controls the crate market is very very small in fact if you want to buy a house apartment you have to pay cash but when you buy i don't know some shoes you can pay it in in small payments it's it's very crazy how it works for example a freelancer that is exporting tech services to our country can get less than 50 of the real value of what he's supporting

and we have more than 30 percent of the population unbanked right so the thing is that in latin america crypto and defy they are not just an option as in the rest of the world but they are a necessity they are something that people really really need and then we see in the in the industry what i see is that the industry needs lots of talent to keep growing at the same speed as it's growing right now and that talent is very very scarce and we also see that lots of crypto and d5 nft protocols and apps need massive adoption which they don't have nowadays krypton defy are mainly niche and they are not used by the massive population

right now and why is this one of the main things is that crypto is very very difficult i see the same thing as happened in with the internet in 1999 it was slow difficult they'd say they wouldn't scale and had lots of issues and then happened what happened and the other thing is that the thing about price and value most of the people everybody knows the price about everything the price of bitcoin ether whatever but mainly i think that very very few really understand its value what they are useful for right so what's the opportunity that we see here uh as vitalik said when he went to

argentina some months ago argentina is an example but this happens mainly in all latin america argentina has a low state capacity but high people capacity right so we see that the industry needs talent to keep building and in latin america and argentina but all latin america we have high skilled tech web 2 builders right and very very good professionals and on the other side we see that the dubs and protocols need massive adoption if they want to change something for real and not be niche as nowadays and the population is demanded that solutions right they really need them solutions for credit for savings for

transfers for lots of things so what's the opportunity we see here the industry demands talent and users and latin america can bring lots of builders and can bring lots of users right but that's the what we see and as we all know uh with the infrastructure of the internet that we have and all the the smartphones that we have nearly more than 95 percent of people in latin america have a cellular phone with internet in their in their uh in their pocket so every human with a po with a cellular phone in their in their pocket can be their own bank right and that's the way we see that crypto can be a weapon of

massive inclusion so what's the challenge here or we think that we have a very big opportunity like here and we are here and to bring these two together we need better ux from applications and we need lots of education i am i'm for sure that we can forget about massive adoption if we don't educate users right users and builders so what are we doing about this uh we are 100 percent dedicated to onboarding people right in the region into latin some people need crypto as a tool for investing for savings uh or or for for working some other people want to start working in the

industry want to start building and what we do is teaching complex things in a very simple way right we start from what's money what's blockchain what's bitcoin what's ethereum smart contracts we talk about a lot about security we talk about investing and we we are like the the gateway for all these people to enter the the industry right so what are the things we are doing and we give online courses we we have lots of tools we have to we have to tr we try to be like in every platform we have we give online classes through zoom we have an education platform we have a discord channel we make quizzes with gamification so that the

people that most learned uh can have prices we are we generate lots of content in youtube in twitter we we start we started making lots of infographics we think that visual er is key for learning from basic subjects subject like what's money i mean the good thing about crypto what i like is that when you start talking about crypto it's like mandatory to start thinking about first like what's money like 90 percent of a population worldwide doesn't know what's money so more complex things like what's a wallet how does it work what's uh custodial what service will soil why is it important to more complex things like

how does main pool work right we go from zero but to very very deep then we also give lectures at universities events banks government three weeks ago i was a jb morgan doing a talk about why defa is important and it was the most attended talk that week and we also started organizing an event called the centromede we organized it once a month the second friday at the same time in more than ten cities in latin america and we think that for the next one there will be more than 20 this is growing pretty pretty fast and here you have some photographs for example because we think that it's also key to know the community i mean people

start learning about the technology learning about its value then they have to get to know the community and after that they they can with that relations that they have developed they can really enter the the industry this is for example the the pop moments from the last event we did in 12 cities at the same time this is done with a we look.io we have here angelo the the founder of it and we are also taking crypto to where it's most needed this for example is the barrio trentine in buenos aires that is one of the poorest countries in the in the city vitalik was here like uh some months ago when he was in bursitis

and here we are teaching people like why why is it important for you to learn about money and why crypto can be a tool for you to to really change your your reality so what we have achieved up to now we have had more than 3 000 students we are putting a lot a lot of focus in having more and more and more women we give lots of scholarships mainly to women and some groups that are not as represented as i should in the in the community we we had more than 50 conferences interviews twitter spaces more than 600 online class hours and we awarded more than 500

scholarships up to now we have students from more from more than 20 countries around the world and we are partnering with a very cool projects such as open separating we look some associations of women in technology proof of integrity and you have you have free coin and for us it's key to be in touch with protocols because we design the contents of our courses with them so that when people graduate from the fire education they can start working for them well this is thanks to a big team we have we have teachers designers illustrators community builders customer success we are

growing pretty fast we are 12 up to now and so how can you join us uh we are looking mainly for protocols and welfare companies who want to partner with us to hire builders or to adopt more users that from my point of view like 100 percent of protocols need this and we also created a scholarships fund to finance the fast growing demand of scholarships because what happened with the bear market is that we started having lots and lots of demand for these scholarships and we couldn't finance it ourselves so we we set up this fund and open sailing was the first company to join it and we are about to announce a big

layer one that's gonna join too so well i hope you can join us in building the biggest weapon of master ocean thank you very much [Applause] for if anyone came for a pop there's a pop obviously i'm gonna give it them i have it i have them here in my in my computer so if you have any questions any questions uh hi what do you personally see as the

biggest challenge in educating people about blockchain okay excellent teachers it's it's very very difficult to get people who know people who know how to teach and people and then that's like empty and then they also need to want to dedicate their time to education that's the most difficult challenge that we have nowadays to be able to scale it okay and how are you planning to solve that well what you're doing is after they graduate we start using that not using we start those graduated students start helping each other and from there we are getting like the new

people helping classes and we hope that they can then start teaching but up to now from the from the students okay thanks thank you are there more questions yeah um and how big was the impact of beer market on people wanting to enter an education how did you see it and yeah yeah uh people people interested in in crypto it goes along with prices when when the media says that bitcoin is going to 1 million everybody wants to enter the industry and they start investing and when they

say it's going to zero far less people want to do that and in fact something that happened that was very painful in argentina was the the disaster of terror and ust lots and lots of people in argentina were investing there and that gave a very very bad uh image for the for the industry so to have that people coming back to crypto is is pretty difficult more questions when we were at e3o in march i had a lot of uh projects from latin america asking if we were aware of them in the broader ethereum ecosystem and it's hard to know because it's there's not a whole lot of

travel back and forth like we're having more and more events internationally come down but what are some other ways aside from maybe some scholarships so that people can travel around the world and we can come down more that we can find out what's going on in latin america and help spread that in the broader community well we have lots of we have lots of spaces uh for example if you if you are into twitter uh in crypto twitter you have lots of spaces from lots of projects in argentina we have more than 50 projects uh building crypto if you if you want to be aware about them you could be following them and you have lots of well spaces discords events everything but yesterday i was thinking

about that there's no there's no like organization uh getting all of them together and like uh showing what they are doing nowadays but there are there are lots of things and there are lots of builders in fact i think that in latin america we have the highest builders per capita worldwide if you see how many projects have been developed and how much they have grown i think it's i think it's the place for builders nowadays are there more questions we still have time for one more question yeah thanks pablo um yeah how are people

on ramping into crypto now in argentina and um i guess like what chains are popular there as well too how are people on ramping into crypto like going from fiat to crypto okay okay excellent in argentina we have lots of capital controls for example it's illegal it's semi-illegal to buy dollars right so people are getting into crypto like in the we call it the blue market but it's like in the black market mostly and one of the tools that is most used uh last assortment to crypto is die basically people lots of lots of people started saving with dai and they got into crypto thanks to that and then they started saying okay what's

bitcoin what's the theory what's this on that but mainly stable coins yes we are running out of time okay thank you very much [Applause] you