Public Goods Funding Keynote Presentation - Buenos Aires 2025

Uh thank you so much. Um very excited to be here uh talking to you about uh Cresto and Alf. Um the funny comments community is very special to me. Um and I'm just so thrilled to have all of you here with us. Uh welcome to Buenosirus.

I think many of you have been here for many days. Uh I hope that you have an amazing time for the rest of the week or longer if you choose to stay. Um, but what I'm going to talk about today is really is the opport the massive opportunity that exists here. And uh, uh, fair warning, a lot of these slides are a little bit old. I have some new slides, but some of these are kind of a few months old.

There's even cooler stuff um that hasn't even made it into this deck. Uh, so strongly recommend checking out the CRUM website and um, and and so on. Um, this is a little bit about me. Um this talk is going to be at the intersection of um crypto macroeconomics uh startup uh ecosystems global economies and kind of what's next. Uh so I'm going to set the stage by talking a little bit about the history uh of Argentina and the kind of backdrop behind this opportunity.

So Argentina started in uh at the top of the world. uh in the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was one of the 10 top 10 countries by the world ranking of GDP per capita. So it truly was at the very top of the world and unfortunately a whole bunch of mismanagement over time, lots of different reasons. Um Argentina has had like this tragic fall from being in the top of the world for the entire half of the 20th century. um it reached like this really terrible point uh where inflation hit um got to up to 100 150% per year eventually in the very last moment 250% per year like this is absolutely insane like most of us have no good concept or understanding of what it is to live in an economy like that um though the US and and Europe we're freaking out over 15% inflation Right?

Like a few years ago, um the US and and the EU were like uh absolutely going crazy over reaching just 15%. Now imagine 150 or 250% uh inflation. This is a condition where people can't really save like the idea of saving for college or saving to to buy a house is like you can't actually do that in the in the local currency. um you either have to move assets into a different currency, you have to immediately spend it, you have to immediately uh buy things or buy some kind of like productive business that might uh return things in the in the future. Um and also if you if you're uh even basic payment systems don't work.

So things like credit cards, um, if you get a payment on a credit card, by the time the credit card company actually releases the funds for the merchant and like the the merchants's bank gets the funds to you um, as a merchant, it might be 60 90 days after the purchase. And by that point, the money that you actually get cannot afford the the stuff that you just sold the person. And so it's just totally kind of a a crazy um or a very different way of of operating an economy. So a lot of the rest of the world which is tuned for a totally different level of inflation um just kind of is incompatible with um with a problem like this. So there's a massive opportunity to um fix a whole bunch of the economic structures and problems and drive an enormous amount of prosperity uh here.

So I I want to talk a little bit about technology. Um first uh most of the of the of the value that gets created across our economies today um is either directly the consequence of some technology or technological output or is underpinned and supported by strong technological output. And so you can you know look at various different measures of success and technological successes underpins all of this. Um and when you think about most of the companies in in all these economies and all these systems uh more and more and more uh the large scale value producing entities in the world um are turning to be either directly producing some kind of software digital um uh system or leverage a a key software innovation to provide some uh normal uh world of atoms type of infrastructure. And so over time over the last 20 30 years and if you put that play that forward especially over the next 10 20 30 years uh most of the economic value will start shifting into um entirely digital uh types of corporations or corporations that can um create an enormous amount of value by moving around these digital flows.

So a lot of people have been working for many years on producing strong uh startup environments all over the world and that has greatly succeeded. Even though initially maybe the internet startups were localized in specific tech hubs in the world nowadays anyone around the world can actually start um a project can start a business can start a startup. So the whole idea of you know having to be in like a Silicon Valley garage to like create the future of technology you can now be in in a garage anywhere in the world. You don't even need a garage. You can be in a coffee shop or like, you know, as long as you have a a a laptop and an internet connection, you're good.

Um, basically almost anywhere in the world, you can you can build the these um these kind of startups. You have an enormous amount of resources uh globally that you can summon and and that kind of can work out. However, startups cannot actually grow everywhere. So what tends to happen is that over time even though startups can start anywhere they tend to migrate to the ecosystems or the economies that best support their growth either because they just can't actually grow in in those other environments or because companies have to make very rational decisions about their cost structures and they end up having to move. So one way of looking at this is through you know evaluating kind of the entire funnel um of going from like very early uh ideas or like you know pre-startup exploration where people are learning about the world all the way to you know you start a company you do you know get seed funding you um start getting product market fit you keep growing into like you know series A series B and so on and then you can grade um each you know various jurisdictions on how well it's working uh in that environment uh in these days the USS is at the top.

So it's like an useful benchmark and you can use it to compare other jurisdictions against it. Right? So you some jurisdictions have a really good kind of very early funnel all the way but maybe they're not so good at the very end or interestingly some jurisdictions are actually terrible at the beginning. It's extremely difficult to start companies but if somehow you end up with a massive company then it's great for you. So Japan and South Korea are a good example of that.

like if you happen to be a massive technology company in Japan, great. Like that that jurisdiction is great for you. But it's very difficult to to get there. So a lot of the entrepreneurs from Japan or South Korea actually have to leave and go to places like Singapore or Hong Kong or or the US um to build their their startups. So with this lens you can look at uh a place like Argentina uh and evaluate the the entire builder funnel and kind of reason through what can you do what kind of interventions can you take to in increase the likelihood of success of any company or project um across this whole pipeline.

And one really interesting thing is that um despite the economic problems in Argentina, perhaps because of them, um a lot of people in Argentina turned to the internet and have been working for lots of lots of other companies, learned an enormous amount of skills and then built an amazingly powerful really stacked um startup ecosystem here. Um however, most of those companies aren't actually incorporated in Argentina. They have to go to Uruguay. They have to go to um uh the US. they have to actually be incorporated elsewhere but most of the talent that creates those companies and that builds those services is Argentinian.

Um we are in a world where these days you know you can figure out whether a company especially in startup uh in software uh startup land is going to succeed usually somewhere between 1 to 3 years you can tell whether it's going to be um some kind of um product that's going to get product market fit or not. And so the good news here is that you can fairly quickly tell whether a startup that gets um started by a group will make it to product market fit um or not. Of course, there are some stories where it took longer. Things like Airbnb and so on took took longer. Um but there's a large number of companies that once they kind of hit this growth stride, then going from, you know, zero to their first million dollars in in ARR uh can be, you know, somewhere between 1 to 3 years.

And then after that there's like very strong growth rates that you can hit where it takes 5 10 15 years to get to the hundred million billion dollar scales. Um so these companies take somewhere between 5 to 15 years to grow into a very successful large scale thing. Um which means that you really need a jurisdiction and an environment with strongity. Meaning you need an an economic environment that is going to give you strong foundations during that period. 5 to 15 years spans many precedencies.

So that means that if you have an economic structure that is swinging and changing like the the business fundamentals, a startup can't actually grow in that environment. Uh and so one major thing that uh a lot of countries that want to cultivate a strong technical uh tech startup hub um need to have a strong long-term predictable um jurisdiction. And like I was mentioning before, companies have to move to the to the better economies over time. And so it's not like you can look at an economy and just kind of improve it and and be happy with that of saying like, hey, it used to be, you know, there were these problems, we fixed this set of problems, we're now better. Let's, you know, applaud and kind of go home and job well done.

Unfortunately, because of the optimization landscape and how it works, companies have to go from any economy that they're in to the best economies. And so you actually have to leaprog and be one of the best economies in the world like in the top 10 in order to actually retain those kinds of uh successful companies. So this is what places like Singapore and Hong Kong and others have done. They've they looked around they understood what it meant to be a very strong um economy for these kinds of uh projects or companies and instituted a worldclass like top level economy and that's why they're so successful today. So if you're, you know, a policy maker or or a kind of an ecosystem designer that wants to achieve that, you don't just have to look at the current problems and fix and fix a set of them.

You have to look at every dimension and try to shoot for the top of the market um in order to be able to compete with the rest of the world. So you have to create like this strong top tier environment. And the cool the good news here is that it's possible in a in a short enough time frame. So you know a lot of people look at places like London or New York that took you know centuries to develop uh in some cases but if you look at Seoul Singapore and Dubai in a matter of 20 to 40 years they were able to trans radically transform themselves um into top uh top tier environments and they did this uh with you know some good standard uh you know common law um type structures uh good for business regulation. uh they focused on attracting uh uh various different kinds of you know financial services or technology companies.

They focus on attracting talent and investment and so on. And they to approach this in different ways. Uh you know Singapore is a much smaller um city state than say South Korea um and then Dubai used a used a whole bunch of economic zones in order to achieve this. Uh they took very different policy paths but the transformation is similar. uh you you had a dramatic shift in the matter of you know 20 to 40 years.

Uh like the Dubai pictures are just amazing. It's just kind of like going from 1991 to 2016. It's just like a world of difference. Um and and by the way that's with like a tiny fraction of the oil of Venezuela. So I will not accept the statement that like Venezuela can't do this.

Venezuela can absolutely do this. Uh it's just you know management. Uh uh we started in a in a um in in a moment where uh crypto and is software eating law and software eating finance. And we have a structure where we could be using uh software systems to dramatically improve the macroeconomic conditions of a place. Um and this is something that I think is is uh starting to get explored by by a bunch of people like we're starting to talk about building kind of cities on chain and and digital jurisdictions and all that kind of stuff.

And so this is kind of like part of partly where where a lot of the the kind of opportunity comes from. Uh so I claim that Argentina could go from its standing in uh in in the kind of like GDP graphs and completely leapfrog a range of other countries and get into you know the top 10 top 20 um uh spots. uh if Argentina institutes a top tier uh world-class environment for building technology companies, if Argentina can do that over the next 2 to 6 years uh and and create a robust foundation that will last 15 years, then this is possible. Uh it it's it sounds hard, but it's not actually that hard. and the economic impact here.

Think about like lifting um you know 40 million people 46 million people um from you know that that this current spot on the on the list all the way to the top like this could be massively transformative. So how do we do that? Well, um you can look and and the Argentinian economy, analyze a bunch of the frictions and realize that a bunch of them come down to just how um financial instruments move, how people use money, how people save, um the kind of rate of inflation, the availability of credit, um the difficulty in incorporating companies, all of that kind of stuff. There's like there's a lot of frictions, but each one of those frictions is not that hard or not that complicated. And so what you can do is like realize that the crypto industry has been building this new financial infrastructure that can support and fix a bunch of these problems.

It's just that the crypto world has like pro bare protocols and bare metal protocols or like interfaces that are you know uh cryptonative and don't really fit the most of the use cases for kind of normal um everyday people. And so the way to solve this is that for each of these problems, you can go and start a company to adapt the underlying technological components that crypto gives you and produce a very high quality service and product that tunes for a specific segment of the market and provides a good user experience that meets customers where they where they are. And so my claim is that Argentina is basically 10 to 20 successful startups away from being one of the top 10 top 20 countries in the world by GDP per capita. And and so like this is like the opportunity. He's like, hey, if you just kind of look at these problems, um, help a lot of founders and teams understand them, help, uh, seed the ecosystem, um, help support their growth, uh, you could get there in a in a matter of 5 10 years.

Um and so and and if you look at the whole builder funnel, crypto onchain rails can can give you a much better environment than whatever the local environment has because it instantly global capital instantly um settling sets of transactions trust minimized all kinds of infrastructure is good for for this kind of um this kind of buildout. And the amazing thing is that there's already a number of Argentinians doing this here both in in um at the forefront of crypto and a forefront of of AI. there's a range of companies um building a set of these kind of these components and the whole point is like both accelerate what they're doing, figure out what is not being done and help support companies um in that that area. And so that's kind of like all the kind of bottoms up perspective and kind of ecosystem building and also know that right now um after this kind of inflation story the country got fed up with that and elected MLE who took a totally radical different uh direction here of trying to fix this economic structure primarily focusing on bringing down inflation and and deregulating a whole bunch of like over overregulated industries. And so this shows that there's massive grassroots support for a shift in the economic landscape and now a top- down support from from the administration being able to um institute these kinds of improvements.

So this is the opportunity that we're all here for. Like this is why um the Cresento group kind of uh is focused on on these set of problems why we got the entire Ethereum community to come uh down here for um for Dev Connect is this kind of massive bottoms up crypto adoption where there's you know uh one in four Argentinians use crypto and use stable coins and and things like that. Massive bottoms up adoption and now strong top- down support. And so this presents like this golden moment of opportunity that could in a matter of four to 10 years totally transform the country and serve as a blueprint for many other economies globally. So how do we do this?

Um so this is where the consument uh movement started. Um it came from this kind of idea of like hey how how can we like catalyze this this um success? Um, most of the talk that I I spend most of my time kind of talking about the the the reasoning for this because a lot of the kind of activity of the move I think a lot of folks here are familiar with like the hub and the activity of the movement and so on and you can find a lot of this. So I'm going to breeze through a bunch of these slides. Um, but know that uh you can find all this stuff on the on the website.

So the movement is trying to you know catalyze this improvement um to help a bunch of builders build these kinds of uh startups. Um it's focused on like three major goals. bringing 5 to 10 million people on chain like grow from the four million to 5 to 10 million that's like you know a sizable fraction of the country make Argentina's tech startup ecosystem around you know 10 times larger and better in terms of the frictions and then this third point figuring out this hard question around how do you build a 20-year stability framework for these companies because they are going to need that u that landscape um there's a lot of stuff going on if you haven't been to the hub strongly recommend you go to the LF hub um go check out the ecosystem it's has massive massive impact. I'll show some numbers uh as well. There's a number of events happening right now and and the community kind of structures this activity in this framework.

We look at kind of different years. We'll look at you know um accelerators of different types that we can run both for individual people and for startups. Um we use pop-up cities to kind of get a critical mass of people thinking about a set of problems um and so on. uh we're already kind of catalyzing I think it's a little bit hard to count but it's kind of like on the scale of like $15 million worth of um kind of investment in Argentina that has been catalyzed by Carimento with a possibility of getting into the into the billions by 2030 which would be be pretty awesome. Um and the scale of impact so far is is is huge.

Like we are talking about thousands of people um uh participating in a bunch of these programs. Uh really things like um some of the online programs and things like the large events like Defconnect started reaching into the tens of thousands of people which is awesome. Uh there's thousands of startups that have engaged and of those like around 230 have gone through specific accelerator programs uh and been supported. And you know, a year ago, we had like this slide of like, let's bring Argentina um let's bring all of crypto to Argentina. And like we're we're on on the path to that.

I'll show you some slides of um the first pop-up that we ran. There's uh better um uh pictures and so on from some of the recent ones. Um but this is kind of like a view into you know the the very first pop-up that uh Christo ran which is Alf. Um and the these are you know some of the gatherings some of the work from a range of startups regulation day uh demo day um that had you know around 300 different uh events um a couple thousand people um there's a video which I I don't think oh yeah it'll play uh there's really exciting epic music but it's it's it's cool I think we we can just see um there's like a really really awesome By the way the pop-up city movement is a very good idea for how do you kind of or help organize um a range of people to work on and think about these these kinds of ideas very quickly. Um at that time we onboarded a range of merchants around to use crypto and to be able to use um various different kind of like crypto payment systems uh to you know totally sidestep this credit card problem.

Um we built this long-running hub which we can go visit like highly recommend. Um and then you know we had this idea of like you know citizen um passports. Uh all of these was on chain. So everyone got their left uh passport and you could like kind of mint it on chain and and and use it. Um we played with stable coins and we like there was like a stable coin that you could use uh for um uh for purchasing food and so on.

A lot of visits from various groups. Uh it was kind of like all over the press. We had regulation day was a really special moment where a lot of the um policy makers in Argentina came together to talk about crypto. This was before crypto was was cool again uh globally. This is kind of like at the height of the of the negative US sentiment.

Um and yeah, then we were kind of like ran a demo day and we helped support a range of the startups in in building their their things and telling the world about what they're doing. Um so yeah, this was like really really awesome and of course the comm the asados were a critical thing. If you haven't been to Argentina, you've got to do it. Um, so this this was like really awesome and all of what you're seeing today and all of the experience that you have now is like 10x larger than what this was, but this was the seed that enabled this kind of um, uh, this kind of activity to happen. So kind of like where are we headed from here?

Um, this is what Kim is going to focus on in 2026. Um, there's going to be another pop-up city in March. So if you like Monosarius, if you've enjoyed your time here over the last week, strongly consider coming and joining us again. Um there's going to be a range of accelerators in April, May, and June. Uh and then there's going to be another Startup World Cup.

There's there's a current Startup World Cup going on right now. The the finale is like later today at dev uh the Devcon uh venue. Uh so check come check that out. Um and just remember that all of this is a big builder funnel. All of this requires a range of programs that can support um the development of people and the development of companies and so on.

And there needs to be kind of a range of programs. And one key question is like how do you do this with that kind of 15 to 20 year longevity in a jurisdiction that has had this pendulum swinging of shifting political structures. Um and so that's where taking inspiration from Dubai, Singapore, so and so on can be very helpful. This is where the concept of an economic zone came from of saying hey actually like these systems were able to create like kind of like a ring fence structure to be able to create a a a protective environment that can let these these companies develop. Um and so you know if if you're kind of if fixing a lot of losses is super difficult um then perhaps an economic zone might be like the right path.

Um and this has been used in a range of countries um we had one the world expert on economic zones helping us design this um a year ago of figuring out what is Argentina's zone of opportunity uh to be able to use these economic zones to to improve that situation. And that's where kind of like the concept came from of saying, hey, instead of like a physical economic zone in a particular location, um, actually potentially make it entirely digital and put it on a blockchain. And so, um, there's a bunch of, so that was kind of like the idea a year ago that has translated into a whole bunch of, um, thoughts and work around how to construct this. Um, and so now there's, uh, there's going to be a whole bunch of announcements coming up about this. And then is the first um uh effort to do this coming from the Christina movement.

Um there was just like the intro blog post I think a day or two ago. Um keep tuned on this. Uh there's going to be like a lot of um more stuff coming. And uh yeah, come follow the movement. Uh come join us in 2026.

And I'm very very glad that so many of you uh chose to spend your uh your November with us uh and help boost and and bring Argentina chain and really drive economic prosperity for millions here. If we can do that well uh then this will be a great blueprint for many other countries uh around the world. Thanks [music] so much. [applause]