Ethereum for the Next Billion: What’s Happening in Latin America?

Transcript

hello everyone i am ayami yagutsu from the same foundation first i'd like to thank edcon and the organizers for putting together this event and also for having me here i have been speaking about ethereum for the next year and for a while in fact that i've been thinking about crypto for the next video for my entire crypto life this happened to me naturally and i think it will happen to you as well as you zoom out and think about where to look for next opportunity first i like to look at where these next billion people really are where babies are born people may know that developing or emerging countries account for over 80

percent of the world's population this number shows the present state but here's another way to look at this there are four hundred thousand babies born every day today in the world and out of the four hundred thousand more than every sixty thousand of them yes ninety percent of all the babies born today are born in the developing world this lets you see the futuristic of humanity and illustrates who will be the next billion users of the team i should also say that when i say ethereum for the next billion i do not just mean the next vm users of the exam it also means an extreme builders and all kinds of diverse participants in

the ecosystem so in other words if we do not succeed in having them involved as the next being members of the ethereum ecosystem that would mean etham somehow failed to survive next i looked at this where creative minds are innovation is no longer a privilege for people in developed or wealthy countries as we have seen in the global innovation index innovations in developing economies show the world how to do more with less this is because they cannot afford to do more with more but they are also constantly using their brains to solve

challenges right in front of them even with the less developed infrastructure and they do not need to unlearn the burden of the old system now as a first step in our effort to work with change makers and the next billion we announced the ethereum foundation fellowship program earlier this year the first cohort has four fellows and their project themselves not only can create huge impacts but they also have potential to inspire others to learn from them and follow i would like to introduce great examples of what i've talked today

by having a conversation with one of the fellows chewie who is doing an amazing job with his team os city to guide the government in latin america to use blockchain as a solution now let me bring chewie hola chewie come on stars [Applause] so chewy is joining from mexico as you can see he's in the dark north of mexico yes yes

so it's late time for you while we are recording this um let's okay first start with um i want i want to introduce i want you to introduce yourself to everyone and then maybe share about your team and some of the projects you've been working on yeah definitely definitely so so i have background as an engineer i did a mechatronics engineering then a phd in artificial intelligence because there was no blockchain at that time uh so when blockchain appeared i started jumping into what this technology can do uh for the world uh which was my premise using artificial intelligence at

the early stages back in 2010 maybe so since 2014 more or less i've been um deep diving in into what we call blockchain meets gothic which means how blockchain can serve as a government technology so we have created a team uh we're four co-founders and and ten teammates uh working on how governments how the public sector can meaningfully adopt uh blockchains so we have done a huge amount of projects around 30 of about 20 30 implementations in different public institutions across latin america ranging from example from subsidies transability to to public purchasing to to police officers and city inspectors

batches uh commercial permits licenses uh kind of transforming how typical official documents work uh into verifiable credentials anchored on the blockchain and providing citizens now with citizens with citizen digital identities which is a g20 um top priority right so this is somehow where we are today awesome so i've been personally very curious curious about a lot of uh innovations in in like emerging economies but why like what we call this gum tech why did you decide to get into this like

i know your team is mainly based in latin america right and so i'm curious why why government why gap tech um i'm not sure if if i chose goptec or goptic trust me or drag me or pull me somehow so so i remember i read one of the first books i read about blockchain uh there was a quote that says it doesn't matter what you want to build with blockchain try to fix something that is broken or corrupt uh so so you kind of get what i'm trying to say right so when we think of uh latin american governments we typically see things that are not working well uh governments that

cannot meet society's expectations democracies living in crisis uh and increasing social pressure um so he felt that that even though most of us at the individual level we don't want to mess with government so what we don't want to deal with governments actually governments get to they have or they happen to mess with our daily lives right uh so if we try to fix or at least improve even at a very small level how the public sector works you can end up improving the lives of many uh you have said that with the the concept of the next billion uh so almost 600 thousand 600 million people uh in in latin america kind of fulfill

that description of the next billion so i i believe that following this idea of having a meaningful life means bringing this kind of technologies into this kind of sectors so i guess this is why i decided to do that to feel that i'm building a meaningful life i see so it makes sense you didn't really try to start with the government it's more like uh when you try to fix things uh problem is right in front of you like you just realized you need to fix this part and that that was usually tied to what what government and you know there was one time when i had the chance to meet uh jack ma and one of his lessons was follow the money so

commercially speaking is about follow the money right follow the catch and see where the cash is going and move your company towards there um when you have a an impact-driven company you're following problems so following this problem trace led me into the govtick right i am i i just just i'm just curious and and i let you keep people asking me but just trying to bounce it back to you i remember when you said to me uh that that we made your work meaningful uh and you have this concept of the ethereum garden right and you you work to make it uh sustainable and to thrive so so what's what's it or what's a meaningful work for ayah what's that mean

awesome oh yeah i like i like you bouncing questions back to me and it's it's better to have interactive conversation yeah thanks for asking um well first of all i am a long-term thinker i think i was born to be so i'm not interested in anything that is not sustainable for the long term like you you really have to zoom up and then think about this looks great for now but is it really great in in 10 years and 20 years um um and then so that the moment that i met crypto that i the i thought the opportunity was with with

next billion users but but then i wasn't very sure you know that was like a 10 years ago uh it was mostly still about bitcoin and i wasn't really very very sure whether crypto can include all the people all the participants that would really benefit from the technology but then ethereum was one and and it kind of like uh expand the way like anyone can participate as a builder or you can build your own solution and smart contracts also let you build any type of decentralized application

so that kind of expands the industries this can be part of um so any industry and also really include include like the the next billion builders or users into this uh and and then yeah i said that yes you you help my work to be meaningful because you do really um like i've been talking about this for a long long time but finally i'm able to show examples this is what i meant this is you know

like without examples it's really i know you probably feel this talking with people from the government they want to see examples they want to hear like actual use cases and so what i meant can can kind of be explained with examples by the work like yours so that is that is really i think meaningful to me i can't really yeah yeah so that's why i've been sharing the excitement how excited i am to come here because it's been a long long long work for me yeah

got it thank you thank you yeah so i guess that maybe um yeah let's talk about the area latin america no like i mentioned that the emerging economies are the source of creativity and innovation uh but some say latin american countries are still a little bit like uh slower on that end but what are your realistic views on that um i mean i i agree that latin american countries are still slower but but this i agree when when i

think of entrepreneurial kind of things like if we think of europe if we think of the united states uh when we think of it in asia uh investment for example venture capital is flowing super fast towards blockchain technologies not only in fintech but broad spectrum of what blockchain means today um and i'm talking about it ethereum rocks that it's it's going crazy these days the nfcs have you read about it today it's crazy so you will you see how fast that is spreading across the world that doesn't spread fast in latin america so in that sense latin america is lower but if we think of the moment that we are living like like exponential technologies exponential changes change

i feel that latin america it's moving at an exponential rate in terms precisely of government increasing pressure so it's social pressure it's booming it's it's going wilder than anywhere else in the world probably we shared those um crack trees so we have those similarities with the next billion concerts that we have so in that sense problems rise faster uh and from an entrepreneurial perspective or an optimistic maybe perspective but crisis is a terrible time to waste so it's multiple opportunities coming super fast to you so so this is what i see what i see i see a slower resources in terms of uh

boosting startups boosting technology but i see reality moving super fast and claiming for the urgency to you for you to bring new solutions to to solve more opportunities to gain more uh market for example in a in a in a commercial term uh to jump into solving all these so i believe it's a combination of both uh some things are moving slower yes uh but some things are moving faster and when you have all these problems when your context is a problem on top of a problem on top of a problem then you have a lot of opportunities you you have a lot of chances to do as you said you have use cases yeah yeah and then i would just realize

those use cases but also um like innovations can be more informal in latin america i think because if you look at some index and numbers uh publicly like when you when when some some people just look at the numbers and then it can be like the number how many number of patterns that have been piled filed or something like that it's but it's it you know like that doesn't really show everything right so i i've been seeing including what you've been doing um a lot of interesting experiments are happening that's a very important

for innovation to to move to the next level i think so you don't sometimes uh you just have natural sandbox of everything exactly i love this natural natural sandbox yeah yeah but you don't even need to clip that box put the box out there you actually kind of the entire probably region is sandbox in a way so that's what i see the excitement yeah so you know like each country region and culture has strength and weaknesses um what do you think are those

for latin american um countries or countries you work with [Music] i guess yeah and i mean you you know for example that oscp is a is a mexican argentinian company uh and and having a mexican argentine company mixing those those worlds i mean from the very north to the very south of latin america uh and with the differences at economic pressures that we have on mexico and economic pressures in argentina uh so all those contrasts and similarities at the same time make me understand that we actually share the same strengths and the same weaknesses we are just shifted in time

so so for example right now argentina is living what i feel that mexico can evade to to live in the next five or ten years economically speaking yeah so we can learn from argentina not to fold it in argentina because of their economy i mean because of many other things but simplifying things because of their economic situation they started adopting cryptocurrencies much earlier than any other country in latin america so so this sense of finding a solution an innovative solution is kind of a new strength of the weakness of our assistance at the same time so so because everything is is so vulnerable somehow it's it's built on

top of non-solid infrastructures it's it's making us be brave enough to innovate or to jump or to believe in the next world right so so i guess this is this is in some sense for example i remember reading the biography one of the books i read on the biography of elon musk uh and well and i know how how polemic he is for the crypto community right now but sorry for using the example but i remember he said like if i knew anything about banks i will never have started uh paypal so this is a similar thing if latin americans knew about economics and all this stuff probably will never adopt these new technologies right so so it's

a sense of naiveness that became our strength uh to build on top of our weaknesses if i can put it somehow trying to make a logic on how i feel um and we are we are moving uh in in the right path or at least being optimistic in in in the path that we are taking towards innovation for finding some solutions but maybe maybe you can tell me more i mean we started this conversation with an ola so so i know i know you lived in mexico i mean it was in the middle of pandemic it was a a very particular moment for for the world but also for mexico so maybe maybe what you saw is not the regular or typical mexico or maybe what you saw was the real mexico because we

were actually out of our flesh because of the pandemic so so giving giving the good connection that i know you created with mexico and latin america what do you see what do you feel that it's our weakness or strength well i mean it's more of the latter as you just said because of the pandemic you know i was in mexico for almost five months um from the end of last year and also early this year but um it's i i saw more of strength um or also like in comparison with other other places because i'm looking at you know japan

where i'm from or the us that i've been living and it's it's just uh how people take um that that did you know the challenges did face sorry how people face big challenges like this it's a global pandemic right it's a scary thing but i don't see mexican people really freaking out it's i i don't i maybe maybe i don't want to offend anyone to stay this way but you know it's more like uh so it's really mental strength how to

face because okay things happen but what do you do with it or how do you live within this you can't just freak up and then just only think about death or the negative future it's more like uh they know how to still live you know you have died day of death so even like how to face things like death is really and also another thing is um so that one of the fear from this global pandemic is economic damage right but um i saw that yeah they don't really it's

it's it's not like um i heard um some mexican people feel bad for people in the us they have to have money to be happy is is that i think that this is actually related to what i said about the entire places sort of like a sandbox is and i also related to what you said they don't need to earn learn things because okay like we don't we don't really have to have a lot of things like we didn't really have a lot of things but we actually are mentally almost like mentally wealthy feeling it's how i how i felt and that's actually very very powerful like i even

i'm not even from there but i felt very positive throughout the entire time it was really great and i'd love to go back and yeah so well okay let's talk about more of the projects that you've been working on like when i first met you in the beginning of 2019 it's been a while but you shared a project with the city in mexico with a city in mexico that uses blockchain to verify and prove that the police officer you're talking to israel i was just blown away by this because so like very the challenge is very local

right like um and but yeah so will you share the story behind this and then how this is going uh yeah yeah good um yeah it's a it's a it's a it's a fun story uh it all started with how can we teach people and public servants the blockchain is a technology of trust and then we say who do we distrust the most so it was it was fun but it was it was actually a challenge that we were having at local government in the metropolitan air monterey where i'm where i'm right now in the north mexico uh and they discovered that they had multiple fake police officers and police officers borrowing their

uniforms to other people or renting their uniforms because it was kind of renting power right for driving or for abusing power you don't know maybe maybe they just wanted to feel the advantage of being a police for a date right but that was happening so we propose that we propose a let's let's create a verifiable credential uh and anchor it to the blockchain so that it's censorship resistance so that even government cannot say like hey i didn't wrote that credential no no you did so so so we use that the digitalization transparency of blockchain to put those credentials and accurate and city inspectors and the proposal was for police officers to wear a cure uh so that citizens can actually scan and and and for city inspectors

which is equivalent um imagine you owned a store and they get to ask for for either for a bribe or maybe to just to to ask for your valid permit and you say like hey let me first check if you are actually respected you scan the queue and you say okay but at the same time that you're scanning and seeing the verifiable credential and comparing the hashes with the blockchain with the verify button because following standards and besides that you send the ping to to to main authorities to to their bosses saying like hey this police officer or dc inspector is at this time at this latitude and longitude and so that was actually increasing control inside government so you were empowering citizens uh making police

officers behave and and bringing more control to to the public sector um that was that was a project that happened uh with previous administrations still a huge challenge uh with the with the gothic or or with having governments as customers is that every electoral time it's kind of a reset uh so you need to start talking you need to and most of the times it's about political party so you were a provider of the last political party you are not friends with me it doesn't matter if i like your technology so that's a huge challenge so that project kind of stood by uh but fortunately we just had elections uh last june uh so in in the first week of september uh most of uh new uh majors and governors

are jumping into the government uh and we have talked to them about these projects and they say hey you know what i actually want to build one government agency that is for places and inspectors so so it's a central authority for this and i say well provide that central authority with this decentralization superpower so probably we're going to revive that for you because actually i guess this is the one of the biggest challenges for people or regular citizens to adopt blockchain is to understand it right to feel it to to do the behavioral change and and one way of nudging these people is is actually to provide this kind of uh empowerment cases like like hey you can trust a police officer or at least um shout out that then he or she is not who who he or she is saying this

yeah and then like you know the listeners here may it may be hard to imagine for people but i i actually felt the importance when i when i actually lived there so i hope i hope like uh you know it can be more utilized and very good example when you're driving and you see the lights of the police officers yeah there are a lot of you like you have to interact with them more often than i i ever experienced in other countries so it it it makes sense um and then like what's happening in argentina i i know like you know that's that's more recent

maybe you can share more when i think about what's happening in argentina it's i mean as a as a mexican i feel like what should i need to do to make this happen in mexico as well but as a latin american i'm super proud and i feel like half of my heart is also but this has to do with world cups and soccer but half of my practice is argentinian oh so you can you can just inspire other first like starting with other latin american countries you are definitely inspired right yeah i don't know as i drink mate and i do kind of things like that but um there are two major things that are happening in argentina the first one

it's a it's cryptocurrency adoption as i referred it it's a natural thing that is happening similar to the natural sandbox that you were saying and the second one it's a is a generalized understanding among public servants about the potential of blockchain so for example when i'm doing a sales presentation or a project proposal to a government or to a public servant i i typically need to do a pre-educational step teaching about blockchain teaching about cryptocurrencies saying what it's a wallet saying what it's an identity saying what it's a verifiable credential and now when you go to argentina most of the governments or most of the public servants they already know

they actually sell oh you're giving me a digital identity oh yes and it's odd is it a wallet should i use metamask so it's like okay they already know so so it it feels like a really really good place like natural sandbox i i i don't know if this is a moment but can i show you a demo about yeah yeah please please do that okay let me let me do it let me do it uh so so i'm gonna show you how the platform and and i'm i'm sorry for what you said this is this is going until the 27th so it's gonna be okay you can see uh so this is the province of missions

digital citizen portal what we have with most of the governments it's a multiple official logins so you have your national id your local id your state level id and so what we did was a way for citizens to be able to register on this platform and pick one of those just the first time for example this i'm getting the tax id number of lucas you know lucas my co-founder so let me log in with the tax id of lucas there it goes so here i'm going to the official argentinian portal uh so it's uh this is the user 23 1 1 29

2010 there you go so if there's a hacker seeing this video and you can type this password please pay lucas taxes [Laughter] so i'm logging into the platform what i'm doing right now is asking the government of argentina to do the job of telling me that lucas is actually lucas right because i have his credentials so i'm going back there he goes so it pulled the name of lucas and the idea of lucas and and now i'm going to give the platform an email and a password uh just lucas at oscd and a password

clicking next and then it's going to ask me to install an app and if you can see my face right now during the call this is the app uh let's see mission something you see uh how can i change it right now there you go there you go yeah yeah yeah release it right so i'm gonna log in here with the recently provided email and password uh so and what i'm logging in here now it says you cannot see it but it says uh we are creating your document holder so it's asking for the ethereum blockchain to provide me a wallet and

then see my screen congratulations you are you are digital citizens of the province of missions so right now what just happened is that i used an official login from the government of argentina it doesn't matter the level to get my account with the with the with the uh with the government of missiones and now here on the app i have i i created my wallet my digital id my public address and private key as well and now here i can have i can port all my credentials so you can see for example here i'm opening a credential you this is my id and you have all the details of that id this is written on the on the blockchain

blockchain which is an ethereum compliant uh blockchain built by the idb the inter-american development bank latin american and korean blockchain um they subsidize transactions so this is a good thing for uh again for the natural sandbox and then we have a verified button to do all the verification on the blockchain with this from there on and if you're seeing my screen i can i can build all the different um certificates this is lucas i'm all i always test this with lucas so i have multiple uh same same certificates for lucas but essentially what we have built is a way to is is it i will say a game-changing thing for governments instead of a government providing you your digital identity or your official

login you are telling the government who are you as a self-sovereign identity and link that to an official or recognized or regulated id that they have you do that one time and then the government start issue credentials to yourself and anchor them on the blockchain for censorship resistance and and that's that's that's changing the game that's changing the game and in that sense it's happening and i remember when i was in the in in the oecd back in um in 2019 and i and i jumped into stage and i shared like 20 different use cases and they said like whoa what who are you why is this possible and and i will say that

this is possible because we have no regulations at all this is this build things [Laughter] so we can create these things we can we can experiment uh we can try during using these natural samples as you said and try to build regulations after we learn what's best yeah and then some of the regulations that are normal or common in the other places they that might not be necessary because this is like a new new infrastructure you're building definitely definitely yeah we if we think about the automotive industry back in back in the day it developed because of the streets and roads uh so decentralization today is

building because of blockchain and we are leveraging that inside government yeah and that's how you can do with with with less this is like uh you know yes when you say this i like for example the very beginning you say and innovators in developing economies show the world how to do more with less right something like that you said so so it's very accurate but i will say it's from the perspective of regulations again like having less politics make it makes an open field to innovation and to do more and maybe build the future uh yeah we think about and this is what happens most of the times like like we think about fixing the present instead of building a future

right and i guess this is the chance that we are having um and this is actually what is happening in argentina in brazil in chile colombia and even in mexico as a company uh but beyond the company as a poor source of a meaningful life we are living a beautiful moment and we want this to last and we want regulators to to first understand what we are doing for regulations to come afterwards and try to learn so from that perspective and and again trying to bounce back to bounce back questions to you uh there is there is a there is a huge moment for the ethereum community that is coming with serenity or eth 2.0 and and a great potential for blockchain to

meeting gothic and maybe other industries so from your position and from the missionary that i know you are what would you say to the regulators um well a lot but to keep it simple well ethereum is a public blockchain so be insane it is meant to be great for anything public right so it's it's supposed to be great for uh the public sector to i think a lot of regulations existing regulations and also like additional ones that are being considered is it's getting a little too much meaning

um it's supposed to be win-win but so i really want anything to like i don't want anything to be lose lose like uh you if you add add something too much and then you can't really take it back but this is supposed to be actually make things we mean for it's not like a night like crypto against the government's more like working together to make it a win-win so i that's why i'm very very excited about uh what you're doing your team is doing and hopefully we can share more of examples from your work

um to the rest of the world not just to latin america that's that's i already said this to you when i you know when we made the decision to have you as a fellow is really to inspire the entire world and i i think you are doing it but and like we just want to share that more to others so thank you thank you that's that's huge for us that's uh uh that's huge for me for us yeah so we appreciate your work and then sorry i think we are running out of the time but this was great and i'm pretty sure people want to hear more about the

details of your project and your work uh how do they find you how do they find your work i mean you can you can go to our website os.cp or write to me just letter j for jesus my initial j at os.ct or you can even see a pdf of what i just showed as a demo at corporate.os.cd awesome okay thank you so much julie thank you for giving us the space and and the time to share and thank you for this beautiful conversation as well of course looking forward to doing more like this okay

thank you thank you chewie and thank you everyone for listening bye