Ethereum for the Next Billion with Marcus AM

F and today we're going to talk about how we onboard the next billion into ethereum and not only that Empower them to access more Financial Freedom using defy as a substrate to do that so before I begin I'm going to tell you a little bit about the fellowship program so the EF fellowship program was started this is the second cohort right now and we are 12. so everyone working from giving Farmers Last Mile access to Insurance in Africa through to education in Syria with Karam we have some folks from Giga that are providing internet access to schools around the world the EF fellowship program is an incredible space and opportunity for people to think about what is the role of ethereum in the global South and what impact can we have in these spaces and communities so if you're interested in learning more I'll give you a bit of a rundown on how one can get involved with the ef's next billion team but the project that I'm working on is seeking to address a social crisis so in Guatemala which is where I'm from we have over 2 million people that live in really inadequate housing so you might what comes into mind perhaps might be something analogous to say the favelas in Brazil it's often time is really really poor housing conditions that people find themselves in so we take them from living in these conditions here to much more improved housing conditions through a project called lamina lamina pop is working with some really amazing partners and functioning what we're doing is thinking of ways to rebuild new housing for disenfranchised communities that's all well and good however um I will tell you a little bit about sort of the the why this matter is massively for folks right so we can build houses for 30 cheaper than leading low-cost Housing Solutions in a fraction of time so within three to four days we can get a house propped up and the buildings that we build are prefabricated so we can ship them anywhere which if you've ever carried more than two concrete blocks you'll understand this actually makes a huge difference uh when building Last Mile housing the problem however is that in order for people to Access housing right here in the States you can get a mortgage for five four percent I mean you know with interest rates going up these things are changing a little bit but really the idea is that you can access low-cost financing for your house with the traditional financial institutions in Latin America in Guatemala this isn't the case so we have these uh incumbent traditional financial institutions that are systematically set up to keep people poor and not necessarily give them access to better Financial Services now interestingly enough incomes defy you can get a low interest rate loan in D5 granted it's over collateralized and we're going to dive into the implications of that but I mean you can even on liquidy get a zero percent interest rate loan um and and the question is like what is it going to take for us to bring these interest rates and the access to D5 which is really amazing two Last Mile communities so how have we been exploring this and why does this matter so we're already seeing a barrage of regulatory uh attacks coming into the crypto ecosystem granted much of it is to some extent like well deserved right it's not that um a lot of the sort of crypto ecosystem did have some bad blood in it so building more resilient anti-fragile regulatory Frameworks for us to say hey look we aren't just building these Ponzi schemes we're actually driving more value to Last Mile communities is crucial moreover right now we aren't a lot of this map here shows you the areas where crypto has a fully established regulatory framework the areas in green is where we're already seeing more clarity emerge in the ecosystem but if you look at the areas in red yellow and gray functionally that means we don't have that much regulation that has fully been established yet so the question is how can we through thought processes of bringing Last Mile defy to people around the world also influence governments in what is primarily the global South to take more crypto-friendly approaches while doing that as we bring people up we're going to grow this ecosystem we're going to become much stronger we're going to take all of the lessons that we have from deploying Last Mile Solutions and say hey this is the relevance for you know account abstraction and NPC so we have so many lessons to take along the way as we begin to deploy more and more of these Solutions and obviously the impact of giving people access to Last Mile financing and drastically improving their lives is huge so the research itself what I've been doing is I've been speaking with hundreds of folks across the ecosystem from universities leading D5 protocols researchers developers creators so on and so forth and asking them listen what's it going to take for us to bring D5 to the masses right another really awesome and some of you in this audience may have even participated with this what I've been doing is I've been crowdsourcing information using social media which has been awesome so I published this graph and this is the first version you're going to see the full version in just a moment and I said hey guys these are my thoughts so far on how we bring Last Mile defy to communities in Latin America what do you guys think and I had a bunch of responses so whether that was James from the EF saying hey you should move account abstraction at the wallet layer nikhil from Cello thinking about underwriting and how we can create more robust underwriting practices in the diva ecosystem or a friend from Guatemala mentioning the importance of off-ramps right so what we ended up with is this massive map and this is part one by the way so this speaks a little bit more to the entrance of what it will ultimately take for a Last Mile this is all on Twitter by the way so and I'm going to share a link to you but please feel free to take photos um what will It ultimately take for us to get there and mapping out all of the dependencies along the way so this is more the sort of like infrastructure or also like individual layer I guess one might say so really the basics is what I call this and then if we dive into the application layer we can see that all of the different sort of use cases that dapps can bring to Last Mile communities whether that be D5 protocols the role decentralized social as well as P2P marketplaces lending protocols and it gets all the way down to thinking about blockchain scalability composability and privacy so what I'm doing at the moment is basically writing a report and I'm going to share with you all this report this is the first time uh sharing version one so I wanted to share some lessons with you so firstly is let's think about the basics here the assumption that many people have internet access is one that isn't necessarily true right so in Latin America more people have access to mobile phones and 90 of of internet usage comes through mobile phones so as we think about developing applications let's optimize for mobile first experiences now that leads me to wallets so anybody here download the uniswap wallet yet um yeah so huge to think about hey Serena uh here's the thing about right the you the The increased adoption of mobile wallets um and how we're continuously going to see more applications leveraging that so identity and reputation also another really fascinating area if we think about decentralized social for example what what infrastructure or what information are we building onto these social graphs that can ultimately help us in giving more transparency to Last Mile communities they may not necessarily have access to other means of establishing the reputation let's say on and off ramp is crucial one of my favorite on and off ramps example is coinbase they partnered with Oxo which is a huge huge gas station and sort of mini Supermarket throughout Mexico they provide 37 000 off-ramps throughout Mexico with just the type of a with just the type of a button and an application incredible Fiat connect from the cello ecosystem also doing an amazing job of trying to create unified on and off ramp Solutions so again all this will be sort of further dived into into the report but just wanted to show with you and share with you some sort of initial findings ecosystem building is huge right we're all here at Denver establishing relationships establishing really strong Partnerships saying hey we should work on this we should work on that creating more education for folks within the current crypto ecosystem but also the wider ecosystem will be crucial in order to continue to develop much more anti-res or fully resilient um relationships and community building so that could be through events it could be through hackathons it could be through establishing different networks that connect with one another obviously real world assets this is a whole sort of another can but uh yep shout out to uh critics and centrifuge and some of the really other amazing teams are developing a lot of innovation on this front right so bringing real world assets is essential scalability and composability again uh won't necessarily dive into this but we are so far away from being able to handle like billions of people using ethereum today right so putting more energy into the scalability aspect is crucial but also composability for the end user it shouldn't matter if I'm using you know one chain or another it should all just interoperate seamlessly and this has all been sort of the uh a lot of the findings that have come through over the course of This research so I'm going to leave it here what I have here is a link to my link tree um you can also find my socials as well there and just wanted to give a quick shout out to lens protocol and cello who are supporting This research please feel free to um yeah share share the report version one what I'm doing over the course of the next couple of weeks we'll be ingesting everyone's feedback on this report generating version two which will be much more polished much more refined um and then from that I'll also be creating a podcast an audio visual Series where we'll be speaking with a whole bunch of different people across the ecosystem so people who are leveraging Bitcoin to bring D5 to people Bitcoin is huge in Latin America so how can we bring more say Bitcoin adoption and integrate that with the ethereum ecosystem potentially um thinking about the role of decentralized Social and onboarding the masses gaming is another key Crux here so I wanted to leave about a few minutes to see if there were any questions from the audience as well feel free to put your hand up speak up and and happy to field any questions or I'd love to hear from you as well like what do you see as being key roadblocks to mass adoption in crypto today specifically D5 so thank you [Applause] I am Marcus have you talked with government representatives and what is their point of views is if so it's sorry with what Representatives governments yeah so that is really interesting that's why I showed this map at the start where a lot of Regulation is still somewhat in the works oftentimes the case in Latin America unless you have a purely like strong anti-crypto census is the case and say Bolivia generally there is a bit of ignorance as far as the extent to which crypto could and how it should be regulated and that's where I feel we have a really strong opportunity here crypto has its strongest product Market fit in the global South in Latin America so if we can show Regulators hey we're building this and this this system that allows us to provide a lot of value to some of the poorest people in your country ultimately with that you know we can build these super pro um friendly regulatory environments so I know you had a question up here as well yeah my question is related with the last one is like basically how are you approaching to the government's uh in in Latin America I'm from Colombia and I know in basically knowledge in America we are struggling with different kind of coins or trying to access our financial systems and how the heat Foundation is trying to approach is government because some governments I don't know bureaucracy plutocracy and yeah you know how is Latin America then I would like to know more about that yeah so for those of you that aren't from Latin America one of the things that is a massive massive Chokehold for us is every four years uh it's it's it's different to how a lot of uh government regulation works here in the states every four years the entire uh cabinet and administ officers of the administration get completely changed so there is no continuity from one government to the next in a lot of Latin American countries so that that creates a really tough environment to think about how we regulate this I think ultimately it's about encoding things in law um in in National Law right and saying hey we want to really sort of establish um these things that you can't necessarily walk back at some point or it would be hard to do so as far as the the ef's next billion team and how they engage with governments there's obviously a lot of open conversation um that they're sharing and having with those folks as well yeah can you tell me more about the off-ramp of the Oxo in Mexico it's just a massive need is that currently working and what level can you open up on that I I don't know like stats wise how it's going but again the way it works is um you have your coinbase wallet and if someone from Mexico has ever used the Oxo off-ramp with coinbase would love to hear more about that but functionally the way that it works is you have your wallet and you can send it to a you know you go into an Oxo you send it to a certain address or even in your coinbase wallet I think it just says like cash out of Oxo you show it to the cashier and then boom you walk out the other really just on the off-ramps piece ATMs are amazing as well like Bitcoin ATMs functionally enabled like peer-to-peer exchanges without having to meet at the same you know time uh is awesome uh I've seen but there's one in Guatemala that gets a ton of use case uh usage and I'm a big fan of that so hey Deepa far ahead when it comes you know Global South there there are these missionaries who go there and really try to spread the word and try to set up circular economies too you know like you don't have to ever off ramp you can just stay within the system and uh so I feel like um there are a number of things that can really help defy reach the you know for financial inclusion one is obviously most of the global South is mobile like they barely use laptop so the ease of transaction and convenience on mobile education hubs will be great like just getting them to hands-on experience using crypto wallets and stuff like that like that's completely lacking so maybe like a Dao kind of a structure at a very Community level you know just capacity building and educating them on using and transacting and also clarifying misinformation because there's tons of misinformation right and mainstream always carries them in you know like the the scam stories so how do we clarify that and I think that education Hub can serve a lot of purpose you know just very down level structures at the community level for sure yeah I think education is key people are surprised like how much Bitcoin is used in Latin America we have these I think it's a consequence of having these use uh instances in our history where people feel a high degree of like resistance to any form of like corruption um and so Bitcoin generally is seen as like the most decentralized Network and therefore people are very inclined to use um Bitcoin and the lightning Network and the rsk network as well so um that that's an interesting take and something to sort of ponder particularly in sort of these um obviously ethereum heavy ecosystems so you know I again I think ultimately it shouldn't necessarily matter um as an end user you know the the interface should be as seamless as logging into your banking app so hi Mila um Latin America is a very diverse space right but do you think relevant do you think it is relevant for us to think this as ladum like even considering the language differences do you think there's a like ecosystem approach to Latin America as a whole like considering the differences and also the language barrier that should be taken into account yeah that's a good question especially coming from a Brazilian um so that it's a really valid point like and I think it is always something I caution people when they're like oh I want to develop you know I want to launch my app in latam I'm like the situation in Honduras is completely different to what you're going to find in Venezuela um but the way I see it is there are historical and cultural similarities but it's certainly not the exact same carbon copy by any means right so if even if we look at El Salvador again obviously very Pro Bitcoin has notoriously been known for being sort of a maxi in that regard um that that is there's a lot of lessons for us to take there so I think it's not like the same strategy should be applied carte blanche across the entire region but it's about like hey what can we learn given we share a relatively similar set of underlying sort of uh yeah I guess at landscape right so yeah but um yeah there's 30 seconds left last chance to if you want to scan the link tree again you'll find sort of the socials and then also all the all the links to the report obviously there's going to be an nft that's coming to come along with this okay it's not working so come find me after um and thank you for your time really appreciate it [Applause]