Geographically Decentralizing Ethereum: The Role of Latin American Communities

Transcript

too awesome hello so we are just going to do it standing up hello I'm Paula I'm from Argentina I'm here with Andy he from Costa Rica and we're going to actually this is the first time we met in person we've been working for six months and this is the first time so thank you for the organizers for this opportunity and for giving us the space to be here we're we are thank you we are going to H tell you about I kipu about the role of latam communities and about a special project that we've been working with Andy that is helping to Geographic geographically

decentralize ethereum then we will let you know a little bit more about that I sorry about eipo well iip is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting theum ecosystem in Latin America it was co-created and is being co-created by latam Community leaders it started last year with an event in Buenos AES Argentina e latam we actually brought together 4,000 people you know Argentina has one of the biggest communities in the region we were really happy about the event it was the first event thinking regionally we

always had in mind to do something bigger as a region and then we had the opportunity to organize e latam at bot this was a different event it was for beginners it was all in Spanish H but it was a great success actually Devcon in bota it was really important um because it gave us the opportunity to highlight what was going on in the region we decided H we realized we all met in person there are also many of the leaders of communities of met in person there and we realized that we've been working with similar goals and then if we join together and we unify our efforts and initiatives we

could do something bigger so we decided to create e k it would not only be an event it would be something bigger well something I there's a slight missing but H something we were talking yesterday and we always like sharing is that in Latin America ethereum is helping to solve real problems you know we have a financial inclusion we have a inflation especially in Argentina we have corruption issues and ethereum is helping to create Solutions and especially is giving us the opportunity and the tools to be part of that Solutions solutions that are being made

by people ER that come from the aing a real passion H to improve our way of living so we built I kipu this started actually in January right H and we are working on six projects the educational Hub we're offer offering open source and free education in Spanish and in Portuguese we uh are organizing our event is latam I actually will invite you all this year will happen in San pedla in Honduras in October you're all invited to to be a part we have a community Hub where we give advice we have handbooks we have a mentoring for

people that want to build their own communities and or that actually that they already have a community but need some advice on different issues we are building a theme tank to have industry reports that will help us make better decisions we also have a special unit of public goods this is a special educational program that H will describe the importance of public in the region and then we have keepo stakers H which is also where we are willing to educate on staking and our main goal is to have more validator notes in Latin America and we will tell you more about that so we are really happy to tell you that today e kipu has more than 25

collaborators we are all e Community leaders from 13 different latam countries so I let you only to talk about h stakers cool so yes keep stakers you might have noticed a similarity with another Community called eat stakers we uh definitely get inspired from them uh so what our goal I guess is to just increase the amount of validator notes in latam we know that uh the notes and the home stakers are uh a key backbone of ethereum decentralization and they actually sensorship persistence and in general just like um like strength of the network so we want to do that and support ethereum and in the process of

doing so also educate on board and support uh individuals and communities who want to stake and be part of this ecosystem um another byproduct of this is not only we strengthen the ethereum network but we also help communities or individuals or um countries or local organizations to create a new sustainable funds of income for their uh activities so let's try to understand latam uh like as a region like Po was already mentioned some of the problems and why crypto like it's such a lifebo ethereum um it's one of the well the seventh biggest Market uh and it has shown an increased growth in the usage of crypto blockchain in general um 2021 2022 um one of five of

the top 30 countries of crypto auction and also in latm so you can see some of them here Brazil Argentina Colombia Equador Mexico and it's just like overall and probably this is also similar to other regions around around the world we have a problem in terms of inflation uh and remids so just sending money from one country to another so those are the two main drivers for adoption but um we saw also that even though there's a good usage of ethereum and crypto in general in latam only 0.52% of the validator notes in the world are in latm that's extremely low so we start asking why why there's no more people um you can see by

the way notat uh there might be other approaches on how to measure this but overall the trend is like latam Africa parts of Asia and Oceania like support or add very little um validators to to the network we can see like one of the problems is like it just gives a lot of power to whatever uh jurisdictions affect the nodes that happen to be in that region so if you analyze uh North americ Europe basically 80% of the notes are there so if there's a legislation that it goes against ethereum against crypto well we get to see these jumps and spikes and reactions so this is as

you might have seen OFA compliance and we peaked at 79% of of the network being like OFA compliant and now thankfully we're are way low we're probably not going to see this problem happen again but we may see others right and most of them are tied to uh legislation and just like um being too tied to a specific country and very similarly as we recognize the importance of client diversity you can see on the left like the amount of like clients that exist on on on the consensus layer and the amount of usage we also want to recognize the importance of geographic diversity so yes uh Europe North America are way high and we would love to see a bit more in

Asia Oceania l America and Africa so we asked the people why don't you steak and uh we got in we made a survey we got like over 50 answers over a weekend um 75% of the people said they don't stick we asked them why and the big sorry this is in Spanish but the big BL thing it says I don't count with 32 e the others two says uh I don't have the theoretical knowledge or like the technical knowledge and in the people that do stake uh some of them they do it with their own validators but most of them just do it on a pool or whatever liquid staking so we say okay how do we change that how do we support more

people to stake and how do we um enable um like more suffering communities and I think we found two approaches right hello the first one is education actually you can find a a really good lesson in a n that Andy gave in YouTube is for begin ERS uh how to do staking uh we are organizing workshops we are Al also well you can tell about the the Synergy with East Taker and the but uh as I told you in the beginning our goal is to reduce the gap of Spanish education and Portuguese also um and this is really an interesting action

that we did with East taker is the global sing Community yeah we notice like basically 99 no I don't know like 95% of just making numbers of the content around staking and how you do it is in English and that's a barrier that's a barrier for most of the rest of the world who is not its first language or or just don't don't have access to this so uh yeah we partner with it thers and now there's a big movement and that's awesome uh to translate more of the knowledge base and hopefully we can do the same with many other like knowledge bases from different projects so one angle education definitely needed the other angle is like actual Hands-On coll operation how can we make awareness of this uh concern and this need of

geographic decentralized in ethereum and what we can do about it so over the last what three mon four months uh we have been meeting with awesome projects uh here on the list are some of them they're trying to explain uh what's our vision what do we think we should do as a community which is basically increase the process in under serve communities under Ser regions and some of these are the the projects we have met so uh one of the approaches that we're trying to um pursue right now is with d node and E kipu which is a node Runner program the goal is to um host workshops of staking and and do that through like test NS and validations and and like lower cost uh ways to people to feel

comfortable to do staking once they have graduated and done a bunch of like uh just shown the performance and the capabilities to run like a note inhouse okay maybe we can give them a hardware and then support by also um provide some liquidity in exchange of um also like donating back to the community so it's a win-win win um individuals help support the community um the like local communities and if people become a bit more sustainable and again like the network overly uh decentralizes another also great uh project that started uh very recently with ether called operation solo Staker is very similar it's like uh eite gifts with dno aato and a few other oval and a

few other partners gives Hardware to individuals uh whose uh goal is just to become node operators and the the liquid staking or or the E comes from the network so again people um perform and do a good job of uh becoming node operators and graduate and get uh not only that knowledge but some U money back by operating those nodes so I guess those are two great uh projects who help um like educate in a a risk-free manner and progressively uh make more notes in in regions where again like they're only under served or under presence right so here you can find more

information about kipo's taking and about e kipo here our social networks so if you want to get in touch we'll be here also um so I think that's it thank you very much I don't know if we have time for any questions thank you so much we really appreciate it thank you very much