Crypto & the Sustainable Development Goals - Gabriela Chang

The Sustainable Development Goals . Uh, that's how this amazing... Oh, it's not there. Oh. Anyway, I'll tell you.

I'm very impressed. I'm happy to see this interest in how this incredible technology can bring about social, economic, and environmental progress. I am Gabriela Chang, co-founder of EthicHub. And I am quite confident that today, after my brief speech, you will all leave here feeling better, like superheroes with the power to change the world, because money is a superpower if you use it to take pride in your profits. Today we're going to talk about how cryptocurrencies can change the world.

Until now, we have tended to be too focused on the monetary value of money. But money is a tool. It is a vehicle for generating happiness and well-being. And there's nothing wrong with making money by generating common good, uh, caring for and helping others, and feeling good about it. The Japanese have a name for this, it's called ikigai.

And it's that point of balance in your life where you find equilibrium between your productive and personal life, and you find a purpose. So, it's about combining what you enjoy doing, what you love doing, what you're good at, what you get paid for, and what's good for the world. I like to give a simple example, like a chef. You're very good at cooking, you get paid for it very good at cooking, you get paid for it , you make a living from it, and you love it. How can this be good for the world?

Well, you can choose to cook only with zero-impact products or hire people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. So, uh, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are a good guide for finding ways to bring purpose to your business. So, I invite you to meditate on this and think about how you can bring all of this together. Well, the human relationship, throughout human history, our relationship with nature has evolved from the survival era, where we were hunters and gatherers, to more extractive civilizations, where we domesticated animals and plants. So, this is agriculture.

It started with small villages, then cities, then empires, and finally jumped to the model of the order of Western industrial civilizations , with a financial system that excluded a quarter of the world's population, creating immense disadvantages and putting a lot of pressure on the ecosystem. So, we are now at the turning point between chaos, collapse, and the possibility of reinventing ourselves. Disruptive technologies can give us the opportunity to create a new civilization of abundance where no one is left behind. We're talking about clean energy, biotechnology, food, power, transportation, information—everything. Whatever you can imagine.

Internet of Things, AI you can imagine. Internet of Things, AI . So, I believe that crypto is the tool to generate the right incentives to make all these tools work together to make this change happen. But technologies are just a tool, even disruptive ones. Therefore, it depends on the right incentives to make them work for good or for bad.

And I am convinced that here at ETH Denver, we have the majority of people with the knowledge to make this crypto economy work and bring about this change. So, this is a graph to compare the evolution of internet adoption in relation to that of cryptocurrencies. As we can see, at this point we would be at approximately 98. Therefore, we are still very, very far from mass adoption. It is still a niche where tech-savvy people from developed countries benefit from the future of finance.

But the promise of cryptocurrencies was to solve financial exclusion. And to build a new system, we have the tools, but we need to start thinking about what the problems were with the previous system. And it was the exclusion of this, this quarter of the world's population. Okay, so we need to create the incentives to make these changes happen. And there are some social outcomes, unexpected outcomes coming from the crypto world.

I'd like to give two examples. One would be the "play-to-earn" Axie, and the other the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador. Nobody, I think nobody expected that thousands of families in the Philippines would be gambling and earning more than the local minimum wage. Imagine poor parents being able to support their children and have time to care for them because of it time to care for them because of it , or El Salvador, where 70% of the population had no bank account and suddenly, in a matter of weeks, thousands of them have wallets and remittances have increased by 25%. I know these solutions are far from perfect, but when the problems are this big, any improvement is welcome.

The star of crypto is DeFi, but what percentage of that is focused on the real economy, on creating a connection to solve the problems we have? Not so much until now, but that is changing. So, instead of calling it is changing. So, instead of calling it DeFi, it's called ReFi, regenerative finance. In simple terms, it means creating more value than you extract.

And there are incredible examples of this. One of them was Climeworks, which in just a few weeks, in a few months, bought so many carbon credits that it drove the price on the market sky-high. So the price on the market sky-high. So now it's very expensive to be a polluting company. And it's very rewarding for carbon sequestrators.

But let's not forget that climate change isn't the only major problem we have to solve. To establish a common basis for addressing them, the United Nations launched the 2030 Agenda to tackle launched the 2030 Agenda to tackle them. So there are 17. And I invite you to read them and also check out the subcategories, because there you will find many incredible business opportunities. And that's very interesting because today, in the traditional world, there is more capital than projects.

And a lot of concessional capital is willing, I mean, governments, foundations, NGOs, they are willing to provide funding absorbing early losses or longer terms. This provides better conditions for the investor, attracting them to the area of impact investing. And after all these years, we already have enough data to prove that sustainable companies outperform traditional ones. Yes, that makes sense. That makes sense, because if you have easier access to money under better conditions, you gain that advantage conditions, you gain that advantage .

And also because consumers are more willing to adopt these sustainable products. And this also gives it a competitive advantage over traditional ones. We need to build a new economic system, a new financial system that includes that quarter of the world's population that is currently excluded. And we need to stop seeing this as charity, but as a huge opportunity. So far, the majority of the unbanked population—we're talking about 2 billion people.

Most of them are small farmers who live in poverty, despite having productive activities. I mean, they produce a third of the world's food, but they're excluded. The only way they can obtain working capital is through informal loans, because even when they have a productive activity, they do not have the adequate guarantees to request loans from banks or the traditional system. So, their only source of funding is the small, informal loans they find in their communities, and they pay over 100% interest on that little money. It's called the cycle of poverty.

I mean, they produce, in the case of coffee, these small, poor farmers produce 80% of the total coffee production in the world, and yet they are left behind. Therefore, the solutions offered are Therefore, the solutions offered are ... the problem is that they don't have data to be evaluated for risk management and they don't have assets to be tokenized. So EthicHub developed a third way, which is a collective collateral, creating a guarantee among all parties that can be used so that lenders do not take risks when lending. This is also a kind of mixed finance, in a sense, and an experimental mixed finance to provide security for impact investing.

Thus, we create a global community that benefits from interaction. Geofarmers supporting real farmers. We are a real-world use case of DeFi , generating value for both sides , generating value for both sides . It's a win-win situation for everyone. Therefore, we are proving that financial inclusion with impact is not only sustainable, but also highly profitable for all parties.

Imagine if we could leverage all these crypto incentives to promote the SDGs in the same way they promote Bitcoin mining. So, the waves of innovation were hydropower, steam power, electrification, the space age, the digital world, and now we are living through the next one. And guess what? It's not DeFi. It's not blockchain.

It's about sustainability. Therefore, we can assume that anything that is not sustainable will cease to be profitable. I invite you to be part of this change, to join and contribute to regenerative finance solutions. Welcome to EthicHub. So, Gabriella and