Opening: Welcome & Year in Review - Buenos Aires 2025

[music] So, I'll quickly go over the agenda and we have a uh bilingual translation app that I'll tell you more about shortly. Um, so if you speak Spanish, you can translate to your phone. If you speak English and we have one one talk in Spanish later, um you can translate to English with an app that we'll share with you shortly. Um so the agenda today uh we have a pretty packed morning so we're going to have to remain on schedule. Um we are about to hear from the residents of funding the commons Buenocitis residency that just completed.

Uh then we'll hear from a few speakers from here uh from Latin America focused on reali applications uh gumoalves and Henry Bayis and that'll be a great morning and then we have Shawn from Stellar. After that, uh, Juan Benet from Protocol Labs, uh, Roger Dingledine, the founder of the tour browser, and then Vitalik will join Roger on stage for a fireside. And then, uh, we have a surprise announcement that's going to be really exciting around noon. And then we have Shadi from Hollowim to close out the morning. And, uh, plenty more speakers in the afternoon.

You can check the agenda on funding.io io and uh click on Buenosides and uh click on schedule or agenda and you'll have the current agenda. Uh we've had some technical issues in part due to the uh cloudflare uh catastrophe yesterday and uh so our schedule's currently on notion uh published but you can see it online in its current form and uh right here. So we also have a workshop room uh that is again upstairs on the second floor and we have some fantastic workshops and interactive uh participatory programming. So if you are um more a fan of you know peer-to-peer interactive style unconference stuff uh definitely check out upstairs.

It's going to be great all day. So this is a special moment in time in the industry of crypto and on a macroeconomic scale. Uh we are facing massive shifts in the landscape of public goods funding. And uh when I say um there's a crisis, there's also an opportunity. And what we are uh really pushing forward here is a style of crypto entrepreneurship that we call real fi.

In other words, real world finance that's focused on solving real problems for real people. Uh non-speculative and uh that is what you're going to hear in the first few talks of the morning. And for me, I believe Argentina along with other countries like Turkey, Venezuela and Nigeria is the ground zero of crypto. This is where uh the industry actually has an opportunity to meet real needs of real people that are uh forced to turn to this technology because the central systems have failed them. And uh yeah, I think most of you are aware of that by now having been here for a little bit and heard stories, but you're going to um really taste and feel uh what this uh type of crypto entrepreneurship is.

So yeah, welcome to Argentina. Um I hope that we can be as a industry uh supportive and really uh come and and support the people here and offer solutions that are built for the people and and uh create value for them. So little summary of funding the commons in 2025. Uh our first event of the year was in San Francisco where we uh forayed into a new topic artificial intelligence and how it can serve the public as well as um some of the kind of risks and dangers of AI. Then we had our second conference of the year in Berlin that was actually uh not a conference.

It was a new format that we call a forum. it was much uh more interactive and participatory and although uh complex logistically the community really liked it and wanted more. So again if you like that style of participatory programming check out the second floor upstairs in the workshop space and just meet each other in um what uh we've called for a long time the hallway track which you'll find just outside. Uh we just completed our funding the commons builder residency which uh you'll hear from some of the residents as soon as I get off the stage. That happened just north of here in Eligra about an hour north of Buenosides and this is our final conference of the year.

So we wanted to give a special shout out to some new partners that we've been working with this year. uh tour project which you'll hear from the founder uh shortly, the UN UNDP alternative financial technology lab and the UNICEF office of innovation and you'll hear from all of these three partners today on stage. So the Buenosit is builder residency. I won't get too much into it because um you're about to hear from some residents that were actually there. So I'll let them share the stories.

Uh here they are. Here's everyone plus some visitors from uh Invisible Gardens, another residency um that we did a little kind of like Arasmus style exchange with. And uh let's see. Yeah, just a little um overlay. We had 30 people from probably 15 countries.

We had Peru, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, and uh all over Brazil [laughter] and all over the place. Another announcement, uh, Logos has a circle upstairs outside at 10:00. So, if you guys want to meet the Logos team behind Status and Codeex and Waku, um, they'll be upstairs in just a few minutes outside. And let's see if we're lucky this works. Uh, I don't have expectations because of Murphy's law.

Technology uh, generally goes wrong usually. So, uh, yeah, I think that we're just going to keep moving and welcome the residents. So, thank you so much