The end of Eurocentric crypto: Scaling Ethereum in LATAM / Camila Ramos Garzon

Transcript

okay oh there we go okay hey everybody um how are you doing so I'm gonna contextualize this talk by saying um this is a ZK stage and I'm going to be talking about ZK but I think one thing that's really important in a lot of these conversations that's maybe been missing is the contextualization of why we're doing this and why it is that we're working on this why this matters so this talk is actually going to be like 90 focused on the why and the context and then I'm going to talk a little bit at the end about what my team and what my project is working on and my goal here and my kind of rationale is you guys as developers you guys as supporters and people who are excited about ZK you can pull up these docs at any time and and like look up the stuff

I was gonna say or I could have said but the things that you can't go look up on someone's dogs is this contextualization that I think is really important um so before we get started my name is Camila Ramos I'm the head of developer relations at risk zero and I'm super super passionate about kind of the why why we're here and that's going to be the focus today so we'll start off real quick by capturing kind of what I think the current state of the industry is so when I did a product I had worked at Sony for a bit and I learned how to do product which I'm not a product person I study computer science I'm an engineer so I kind of did that as like a stint of figuring out what I was trying to do back in the day and I learned this like

cool chart that helps you contextualize what it is that you're building and it's this four quadrant thing that has on one end the type of problem and then the number of people impacted by the problem and in product where you want to be is you want to solve a big problem for a lot of people because then you have a big Market Etc and I think right now in the industry we're in this quadrant where we're solving a relatively small problem for a relatively small group of people and I think that's where we end up with like the you know this kind of like meme stuff that the outside world thinks of us I don't think I don't think this obviously I think there's a lot of people and projects working on very high impact high value things but I think generally this is the state of the

industry and you know there's some people that get really upset when I say that and like I don't know I feel like I'm in crypto I get to say it if you're not in crypto and you said this I would be mad too but it's like it's just the facts this is the state of the industry we're solving a relatively small problem for a very small group of people and where we want to be is in this quadrant we want to solve a big problem for a lot of people so how can we do that like what are the steps that we need to get there I think and this is maybe like a little bit too obvious but I think this is actually a point that's been missing in a lot of conversations recently is like we have to go to the places where there

are problems like physically mentally ideologically intellectually and figure out how we can apply our Concepts there and my kind of thesis is that the best place to do this is by going to places where there's necessity because I really do believe that necessity breeds innovation so what do I mean by that and kind of the things that I want to talk about here are like what do I mean when I say solve real problems and kind of what are the missing technical pieces in order to get us there so I'm going to talk about latam and and kind of going to make the Bold case for why I think developers investors and People Like Us need to be focusing our attention and capital to this region because I think it's ripe for stuff that we're all trying to do so long story short if you if I had to

summarize this all this is saying is like consumers in Latin America are already displaying behaviors that make them and position them in Center Stage for crypto based Alternatives so things like mobile first payments adoption of Neo Banks heavy Reliance on cross-border remittance payments growing political and social socionomic instability and social pressures so the the thing that I think is actually most interesting about these stats is the adoption of neobank and non-bank stuff so when we say neobank and non-bake we're talking things like PayPal and and the likes that are not like Banks per se but they offer financial services so nearly half of the population remains unbanked in Latin America and a large vast majority of people in Brazil Mexico Colombia

Argentina and other countries that just weren't listed in this report stated regular usage of online payments through Neo and non-bank applications like PayPal Pago and other ones and I put this chart here because I think it really visualizes like how great the usage is and it's really overwhelming the other thing that I think is really interesting and like a really ripe opportunity for crypto are remittance payments so remains payments are like the cross-border payments of you sending money back home or you sending money to family members in other countries so according to a report by the World Bank in 2021 remains flows to Latin America and the Caribbean reached 131 billion dollars in 2021.

and according to that same report remains is in 2021 represent almost 25 percent of the GDP in both Honduras and El Salvador and 14.8 percent of Guatemala so it's like a quarter of the entire country's GDP is just from remains payments and the systems that exist now are not great you're paying high fees there's low operational speed and it's kind of the de facto mode and it's the only option people have and what's really interesting is that when you look at P2P um traffic on crypto platforms you'll see that Latin America is actually really really high up maybe the colors aren't as clear back there so I'll tell you Latin America is the one oh I have a pointer I think okay Latin America is

this blue one that's like up here this one so when you think about countries and regions that are transacting in crypto at least for me when I first kind of embarked on this journey of researching stuff in Latin America and trying to make this case I definitely did not expect for Latin America to be in the top percentage of peer-to-peer transactions and what that tells me is that and what we're gonna talk about in the next slides is like there's something going on in this region that is pushing these transactions into happening because later on you'll see and in these reports you'll see these are not the regions that are using defy and kind of like the the like crypto native applications that are out there this one is really interesting it's like the the key got cut off but blue is represents men in the in this light

green represents women and if you look at Latin American countries like Colombia Mexico Brazil women and you know and there's like categorized into developing and developed women in developing countries are actually transacting and holding crypto at a similar or higher rate than men in developed countries I have a whole thesis on this and about like machismo and like Latin culture and how it like opens up the the way for women to transact in a way that's within the social norms but that's allowing them to just kind of like experience Financial Freedom in a different way but we just don't have time for that my other point is that in these regions there's a lot of inflation and destabilization of the local currency so the key is kind of small but like in

these first few countries inflation is at the 200 Mark and then the bottom ones is like 75 and close to 75 percent and like these people their their local currency is getting devalued more and more every day Argentina is going through a crisis there's a black market for US Dollars like literally it's illegal to have US Dollars first of all so there's a black market to have US dollars because it's the only way for them to store value in like hold it together from getting completely plummeted by the market the next thing that I want to really focus on is like my thesis on what happens when you solve hyperlocal problems and the kind of growth that can come from that and these are some examples that I'm going to give so is like the Latin version of something like eBay or Amazon it's kind of like a

mix because it's it's anyone can go on there and sell things anything Services cars like a table art anything you want it started in Columbia a decade ago and it started as a Marketplace for locally made goods and they created their own payment system called medical Bago to handle the the finance part of it and when this started literally mad cow Papa Was Made for This platform just to handle payments on it and since then it's grown it's grown so much that now it's a whole Neo bank that offers like a bunch of financial services and what they did was really interesting because they just focused on solving one really small problem which is like how do we manage the transactions and the like the money part the payments part of this online like good system that we're selling and what they saw was that people were when

people were overwhelmingly using the system they were really happy with the system and then saw that opportunity they smell the blood and they went on to capture the entire market and now they're one of the most widely used Financial products in Latin America another one is pix pay um that's spelled wrong it should be an X I thought I updated that but pixpay is Brazil's dominant digital payments app Brazil's another country that's like super center stage for crypto they're one of the they're one of the countries in Latin America that transacts at the highest rate and that participates the most in in crypto stuff so it has over 60 million users and in monthly transactions it's equivalent to over yeah like more than a billion dollars a million dollars I knew that was so 6.8 billion real is that's their local

currency but like that's a that's a ton of money of monthly transactions every month and again this started as like a Super Hyper local thing it's still hyper local it's only available in Brazil and it's the dominant payments uh digital app at this point the other thing I want to talk about now kind of moving on to the to the ZK part in like the the part that you guys are probably most interested in the things that I think are kind of missing in order to get us to this point are things around ux and cause for transaction so when you're dealing with an uh population that has a lot of price sensitivity you're thinking about a population whose average monthly income is like 500 a month so when you were talking about transaction fees it has to be in the fractions of a cent in order for it to

make sense for a population like this and there's been a lot of progress made in just the last like three months on this like optimism's Bedrock upgrade I just was reading today that they were able to lower transaction fees to like less than 10 cents for uh for sending ether and like less than that for a swap and if you look at I think l2b today a lot of the l2s are actually like their prices are going lower and even for the ZK stuff when they first came out it has this like inverse relationship where a lot of people have to use it in order for the price to go low because it's shared amongst many proofs so right now it's in kind of a weird place because it's not having a ton of usage yet but in the future it's going to get to a place where these transaction fees

are in a place where you can realistically use them in a region with this level of price sensitivity the other thing that I've seen people like a discourse that I've seen often are people kind of maybe not understanding what we say when we're like oh transaction fees have to be a fraction of a penny and people are like oh but like three dollars isn't that bad or you know like whatever whatever the current like prices like it's not that bad and for us it's really not that bad I think like everyone here we can easily spend three four seven twelve like fourteen dollars on a transaction but when you contextualize it by like the local market so for example I live in Colombia now I'm from Colombia and a lunch every day like the kind of classic lunch is like five dollars and that's like me like going

kind of like a Step Beyond the regular like lunch you can eat every day so people who are eating lunch for like three four dollars are not about to spend three four dollars on a transaction when you think about the the number of times that you transact on a daily basis and the level of opportunity there is for transaction in these regions okay and the other part that's missing is like a level of increased security because again when you're dealing with the super price sensitive population it's not acceptable to just be like oh there was like a hack or there was like you know some like security vulnerability and we lost your money for people like this it's like a completely unfathomable and unfathomable unfathomable and like life ruining to lose twenty dollars you know like that maybe that's a little bit dramatic but

when you're talking about a population who's literally living with 500 a month and that's average there's people above and below that obviously you know we can't really make the convincing argument that this is a better more robust system until we figure these things out and that's why I'm interested in ZK and that's why I'm kind of working in this space and I think there's a lot of cool teams that are doing interesting things specifically I think succinct Labs so for the ZK kind of super people that are interested in here if you haven't checked out succinct Labs you should definitely check it out they're doing ZK proven consensus and they're building this thing called telepathy and it's really really interesting interoperable interoperability protocol that I think is maybe not like super widely talked about yet Axiom is doing really cool stuff for Zero's doing really cool stuff and the ZK AVM

projects are all doing really cool stuff and then the thing that I think is also missing is new and improved recovery flows and I think a lot of teams are working on that you know there's been like a lot of conversations about account abstraction and I think we're moving in the right direction for something like this so now I'm gonna talk very briefly about risk zero that's the project that I work on and for those who don't know they're building a ZK VM there's actually it's built it exists and the thing that's most interesting is their product Bonsai so Bonsai is a the end game for them is like a decentralized proving service where anybody on any chain any application can request and post proofs and what I mean by that is like you can be on let's say ethereum layer one or optimism or wherever you want to be

and you want to move computation off chain because it's too expensive or whatever the case you can write your application you can write a regular smart contract in solidity then you can have a separate contract or a separate program in Rust and in theory any language that can Target risk five do some computation and then get approved that that computation was done correctly and have that proof on chain and have that proof verified on chain and I think the the thing that's really cool here is that like just in general the ability to move computational chain but also to prove Providence and have like the security properties and the Privacy properties are the pieces that I think are really going to make something like what I just described real and the thing that's really cool about

risero is that you can leverage existing ecosystems into your Dev workflow so instead of having to learn a new DSL and like having to kind of bootstrap a new ecosystem from the beginning as far as tooling and libraries Etc you can leverage existing workflows like cargo and crates when you're talking about the rust ecosystem which has a very mature and robust ecosystem and that really opens the doors for just like a healthy developer ecosystem without having to like bootstrap it over many years before this I worked at Fuel and fuel we were building a roll-up on ethereum that was not evm and one of the most like impressive but yet difficult things about that project was that they had to bootstrap an entirely new ecosystem with a new language with new tooling with new

sdks and it really just is a uphill battle for developers to convince them one that they should learn all these new things and then two wait for a level of maturity to be able to say you have the things that you actually need in your day-to-day and your developer workflows I wrote more about kind of this thesis in this blog post called the dead end of eurocentric crypto if anyone wants to check it out more um that QR code should take you to mirror and but if you can't find it for some reason you should just be able to Google the dead end of your Accenture crypto and there I kind of give more stats and talk more about the specific thesis and if anyone here is like super interested lives in Latin America is working on any project that could kind of work towards this I would love to

connect after and yeah thank you so much we have about three minutes left for questions thanks Camila any questions anyone yeah um so you mentioned about um you know diversity in the blockchain ecosystem and how we can help including other religions and one of the questions uh that I have for example is how easy or like for example if I was a company that I was trying to look to look for engineers coming from South America what should I look like what are the resources or the places that I have been

that I have to go in order to kind of include developers from from those regions yeah I think um unfortunately there isn't like a central place where I could be like go to this and you'll access everyone so it's kind of like on a case-by-case basis but it's gonna sound so so corny but it's the truth like Twitter is the best place if you want to find developers to work on your thing if you want to find developers to use your thing I think most most cities that are crypto hubs like Medellin like Buenos Aires like Mexico City they have some sort of like government uh more like local government thing like machine has this thing called and it's a whole like government-backed program to get more software developers jobs and to connect them to the wider ecosystem so something like that might be a really good thing and if you

specifically want to chat I can like connect you to some people if that's something that you would like any anyone else with any questions hey thanks for the talk um how do you think about the problem uh for people in latam to move money on chain and move money off chain that seems to be always like yeah the point where it just breaks all of her yeah um as so I moved to Colombia to do this type of research actually because I think so I wrote this the post that I that I posted up there in October of last year right before Devcon I published it and the number one piece of feedback that I got was like you're pointing out a problem and that's really

easy to do but like what about the solution and like that that really hit me and I was like you're right like I'm gonna go try to figure it out and that is like the biggest blocker I think is like having on in our frames but what I do think is that there are more friendly regulatory Vibes in Latin America than there are at least in the states I know Europe is also trying to at least the UK is like trying to be more friendly so although it's not very robust yet I do think that there is a much better chance of robust regulation and Regulatory stuff that opens the door for this episode so there are on and off ramps like as of I think they just like literally just a couple months ago you can't use binance anymore but up until then you could use finance and kind of

that was the go-to but there's a lot of teams that are building very local solutions to allow people to on-ramp their Colombian pesos like not US dollars but their local currency and and like move it to answer your question I think it is the number one blocker and I don't think like at least me I have an answer for like how you solve that I think the answer is like more of us have to do devrel in like politics like so you have to go back to your country uh call your senators or like whatever the equivalent is go speak in front of your Congress and like it's the only way it's gonna happen so that's kind of what I'm trying to do in Colombia is like bring my expertise and my skills as someone who's Colombian and be like this is what we should do it's

the only way to make regulatory changes happen sorry it's not a good answer there is something that that recently happened in El Salvador also I think in Latin America the legislations and all is quite getting open and friendlier to you know crypto and blockchain space yeah yeah for sure like like I said I think in general the vibe is a lot more friendly and I think El Salvador I think it was El Salvador that's trying to propose like a central bank digital currency thing I think that is what made news in the last weeks that it is the first uh first country in the world to do that yeah and they accept Bitcoin and

you know cryptocurrencies are legal tender that's legal tender yeah exactly any other questions around Latin America or Europe or the world in general or blockchains okay not the world in general I don't have the answers okay patients can still come no okay okay not uh thank you Camilla cool thanks everyone [Applause] [Music]