The Huge Opportunity in Argentina I Juan Benet

Please join me in giving a massive round of applause to Juan Baker for Protocol Labs. [applause] Excited to be here. Uh welcome to Monayas. I'm going to be talking about Presento which is movement and a left which is an a pop-up city that is turning into an onchain city. I'll talk I'll first start talking about the broad large scale opportunity uh that exists here in Argentina.

There we go. Stand over to the side so you can see the Argentina started at the top of the world at the beginning of the 20th century. It was one of the top 10 countries by the GDP per capita. who truly was talked about at the time as one of the major um economies. Buenos areas was one of the top cities in the world.

Um Argentina was truly on the top of the world. However, a whole bunch of economic mismanagement um through the latter half of the 20th century plunged Argentina down into the 60th or 70th spot. Um this is a a really tragic fall um that Argentina Argentinians are still recovering from. In the last couple decades, there's been um an enormous amount of of inflation along the the way. And it's very difficult for a lot of people who haven't experienced inflation to grock just how difficult this can make life.

Um the western world worried about 15% inflation. Uh that's kind of a few years ago um inflation rose up from 2 to 3% all the way to 16%. the western world like the US um the EU a lot of Latin America um were worried about this to this degree in Argentina there's been 100 to 150% inflation per year uh for a long time we got all the way up to 250% at the very last moment of the last um uh presidency and this is just a a totally different way to to operate. You cannot save for for things. You cannot save uh families cannot save for for college for for students.

Um people cannot save for houses or for cars, things like that immediately when you get some paycheck. You have to spend it right away. Sometimes ideally the same day. People will line up their, you know, the moment they get paid to immediately spend it. Um because the prices might be uh plunging that very same day.

Um at at the height of this moment uh there was even a condition where like you know the prices uh in menus and restaurants were like stickers because they have to be like redone um you know every day or every few days. Super super crazy. Now that had a two major results recently. One is that it onboarded an enormous amount of people to crypto because one other thing that you can do with your paycheck when you immediately get it is to move it into another set of assets that is way stronger. This led to the the one of the biggest adoption rates of stable coins in the world.

Uh somewhere between it's really hard to imagine because people you know don't really talk about this very publicly but somewhere between 10 to 20% of Argentinians hold significant amounts of their of their wealth on crypto. Um and a large fraction of that is stable coins that USD uses. So this is why Latin America is one of the places where crypto is growing fastest and specifically Argentina is one of one that has a very strong crypto native community already. Um also Argentina um was early to internet uh tech development and has a long history of great technology company creation. Lots of founders and lots of talented people um get start here work either for remote companies or Argentina companies and then they go on to start Argentinian companies.

Um this uh there's been many um important kind of unicorn companies coming out of Argentina. A lot of fundamental crypto uh companies and crypto innovation has started here. Um, and there's also, you know, a set of AI companies that are being developed by continuous. The problem though is that a lot of these don't stay here. Most of these starting companies end up having to relocate um potentially might move to Uruguay or might move to the US or other places.

And when that happens, they take a lot of that wealth um to be uh great created and grown elsewhere. Now, of course, a lot of that wealth comes back to the country as people are employed here, but the vault of the long-term investment of these technology companies um ends up going and the problem fundamentally is that corporations and networks of great value have are within an evolutionary landscape where they face serious pressure to optimize and go to the best possible top tier environment they can be. This is why it tends to be that while the whole world is a good enough place to start companies, people can start companies just by having a an internet connection and a um and a laptop and you have stories of, you know, uh people starting amazing companies from anywhere, they tend to move to other economies that can best support their growth. Uh and so it's not enough for an economy to just kind of improve. you really have to have a top tier full world scale environment.

Uh so you have to think of economies in competition with each other and if an economy isn't a top tier environment companies will have to move they will be forced to move to other locations. This is just kind of an unavoidable process. So uh what can we do about this? We can look at the entire um pipeline of technology company development. Think about all the different stages that a company might go through.

Everything from the very early stages of acception of an idea um the prototyping um the finding the product market fit the incorporation company the early stages of fundraising all the way through you know scaling a product uh getting into larger expansions across the world um and so on getting all the way to the the top of the market. You can then grade uh in every any particular country as how well it's doing across all of these stages. uh and and you have some like interesting uh you can some interesting details drop out of this. So a place like the UK is really good for the early and midstages of company development. You see a lot of technology companies get developed there but at some point they hit some ceiling and they can't actually keep growing there and they eventually tend to move to the US or other locations.

Um the reverse is happening in Japan and South Korea where it's actually extremely difficult to start new things. It's just in general not a great place to be an entrepreneur. Um not tons of frictions. um not very good good support for for founders and builders. However, if you somehow manage to arrive at creating a very large company, it's in it's a great place to have mega technology companies, which is why both of those countries now have minorly these like massive scale technology companies that are kind of in in trench and there there aren't new challenges there.

Uh most founders end up having to leave those places and go to starting companies in Singapore or Hong Kong or other places like that in the US. Now, Argentina has like really punches above its weight in the early stage. It has amazing talent, but the midstage is not great and and the end state is really bad. And so, that means that most Argentinians end up leaving. Um, so what a a country should do is look at each of these stages and improve the conditions, especially starting in the earlier stages, but you really need a successful endgame because you're just otherwise delaying the network.

Eventually, the companies will end up having to leave. So, how do we do this? We can look at all of the different aspects of economic life for individuals and for companies and for uh organizations and think about all the different frictions that they encounter. Everything from how they hold um uh capital um you know individuals just having a bank account um being able to send payments being able to save being able to get credit. Um things like mortgages, being able to get a mortgage through buying a house or something like that.

Um, for corporations it might mean a corporate registry, how easy it is to incorporate a business, how easy is it to navigate the the legal landscape, how easy is it to uh employ people, how easy it is to raise money, all that kind of stuff. So each of those those um processes has some kind of friction and if your friction is above coefficient um then you should expect that the people and the companies will end up having to leave. Now the good news is that the entire crypto industry has been spending uh you know 15 years building a new internet native global economic um system. Uh we have a ton of primitives that could dramatically improve these frictions and not just improve these frictions but potentially bolt them into a condition that's even better than some of the other top tier environments. So if you think about the underlying infrastructure that crypto has built, we built onchain uh rails for um holding value, paying people um being able to take loans.

So you can build mortgages on top of that. You have registries which you can use for property or for corporations. You have the ability to uh have smart contracts so you can involve you know employment law and all all this kind of stuff. So we have the the underlying economic rails to be to build a nationwide economy. However, the products aren't there yet in terms of the ease of use of these rails to be able to deliver a a great experience for people.

So today you have the kind of like the hard part built. You have like a core engine that would enable building something like mortgages. uh but you don't have a very nice um software uh primitives and and a nice service and product and like a good go to market strategy to bring that to uh consumers uh in a country like Argentina. And to be fair, there aren't many mortgages here just because of this kind of um inflation problem. Uh inflation and other friction probably inhibited um the the growth of of an access.

So, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, how to improve a country like Argentina, you could bring mortgages to a place like this by building on these amazing onchain primitives, build a good high quality product um and be able to deliver it to to millions of people here. So, I I kind of tend to think about this as like, you know, to solve each of these frictions, you need one successful high quality product, one successful high quality service, which a startup can build. And if you have somewhere between 10 to 20 of these core friction, then that really just means 10 to 20 strong startups and strong products. If if we could build those and succeed, you could vault hard from where it is now um into being a a global top tier economy. The other thing that starts to need is a an environment with good longevity in ter and stability.

Uh these these kinds of systems take somewhere between 5 to 15 years to grow. You can usually tell somewhere between you know 1 to three years whether a product is going to have product market fit whether the timing is right whether it's scalable and so on but it takes somewhere between 10 to 15 years to grow to the billion dollar type scale of outcome that really starts affecting an economy. So if you have an a political environment where the economic conditions are changing you know every four to eight years um then that uh but that that doesn't let these kinds of companies grow and operate. So you need to establish some long-term um infrastructure, some some long-term longevity um to to the stable um economic growth. This is where um countries should look around and look at the best top tier environments and see how transformations have been done from going from like less good economies to to that back success.

And again, here's where Soul, Singapore, and Dubai are extremely good examples. each of these um places uh very different countries being so cloud Korea so it's a fairly large country Singapore is a steady state and Dubai employ lots of different economic zones so three very different approaches but they the all the the three of them applied this very enlightened leadership perspective of looking around um the world looking at the best top tier um conditions and learning from those those places they looked at places in the UK the US Japan and replicated a lot of that those top tier conditions and were able to create such a strong economic um powerhouse that they completely transformed their cities and their economies um in a in a short while. Uh the my favorite is this picture by take this 1990 and you know in 20 25 years just complete transformation of the um the economy and and the entire city and so on and they did that with a tiny fraction of the level of oil that a place like Venezuela has. So it's not even like this isn't really about getting getting super lucky about resources. It's entirely about good management like good um policym.

So the other consequence of the infliction um in Argentina is that finally Argentinians were super fed up with this condition and they elected the first libertarian president in the world. Uh Harry Malay is an economist who ran on a campaign of let's fix the fundamentals that they found in Argentina won in a in a um you know it was a third party candidate um and and won it was an amazing result and since then inflation has come down uh dramatically all kinds of of of factors around the economy are improving um and it seems to be really working to to create a better better inflation. Now uh it takes a while it takes sometimes a year or two years um for that those improvements to you know uh percolate through the entire economy. Um so it is kind of a you know very different way of operating. Um but already a lot of indications show that uh businesses are recovering significantly.

Um there's a lot of um uh uh progress inflation has gone down dramatically. Um and so this is like a very positive kind of economic change. What's not clear is how this is going to turn into long-term prosperity. How how do we go from this kind of improvement economically to long-term prosperity the end you know greatly reducing poverty um and getting to a competition where most Argentinians are able to thrive um and that's kind of where these kind of economic frictions need to be solved and where we need people building these high quality products that can bring Argentina into 21st century. So the big opportunity here is that there's gigantic bottoms of crypto adoption and and a bunch of top down support that creates the perfect condition to have the first crypton native macroeconomy.

We could end up with a the first macroeconomy that uses onchain crypto rails to run major functions in existence and in services. Um, and this could be one of the, you know, next big steps for the crypto community to take. And, and the good news here is that it just requires people like you, builders, [clears throat] to find these kinds of problems, solve core problems for, um, a a population of users and customers and so on, um, and deliver a, you know, top tier high quality recognition for. So if it did this well, Argentina could vault over and leaprog a whole range of other economies and get into the top 10 or top 20 again. Um, and so I fully believe this is possible especially because of how crypto um enables access to global capital markets and because crypto is extremely well positioned uh to leverage AI systems and the what AI is going to do to miners over the next 5 to 10 years.

Uh so this is you know massive scale potential. Now um I want to talk about a a um movement that um a set of us started to drive this transformation. In fact, it's the reason why uh Dev Connect ended up here uh this year. uh we saw this opportunity and we said hey let's um organize a set of people to talk about these ideas to like raise the point of this opportunity attract builders from around the world to come help build this get Argentinians themselves thinking about these kind of problems and kind of trying to build this as fast as possible because there's only kind of like a 4 to 8year window um with this kind of um very uh kind of libertarian oriented rule set that is perfectly compatible with crypto to put in place these kinds of improvements. So that's kind of like the the the the possibility space here is like the macro environment created this perfect condition for massive crypto adoption that could enable this deep project.

Um and if it happens in the next 4 to 8 years uh we could be we could succeed. So this movement has these three major goals. Number one is to bring another 5 to 10 million people on chain because that would take Argentina um into like 30 or 40% of people um now able to make mega which would be you know gigantic relative to many other countries in the world. Um, two, making our continuous tech startup ecosystem 10 times larger and better at reducing a lot of frictions, attract funding from uh from elsewhere and be able to support uh companies. And third, really figure out this key question about this 20 years stability structure because that is like a fundamental thing that is going to determine whether or not the companies stay here or they end up going somewhere else.

So the movement today is running really strong. I'll talk a little bit about, you know, how it started and and where it's headed. this is kind of the you know we created this line very early on of saying hey we need to be able to like accelerate a set of builders um we need to be able to kind of organ spread the work to thousands of people so let's kind of organize our city or something like that um and then be able to kind of do the policy work um with various government folks and regulators to be able to get there and we have these kind of very ambitious goals of getting through you know really strong prosperity um you know 26 27 and uh the and and we sort of like set the work and the First, I'll show you a little bit of a view into my first public city that we ran. Um, and then I'll talk a bit about what's nice to school. And I'll I'll run through this very quickly.

Um, because this is kind of like what covered on the internet and you can come see it for yourself to give you a um Heat. Heat. One of the thing that we did was we onboarded as a full set of merchants to be using crypto directly. And for them it was a major shift because now instead of being paid for their credit card and then collecting that money 30 or 60 or 90 days later when it, you know, has inflated and no longer nearly um as valuable, they could be paid in stable coins right away. Um and they could go to, you know, whatever asset uh they wanted to to be in.

Um and so that was like really significantly. Yeah. Here's a view. So like we we had like a you know the city had, you know, onchain passports and and so on. Um yeah, here's something all of that city.

So then in um since then uh the movement has uh grown uh quite a bit. Yeah. The movement now has grown tremendously. So in about a year and 2 months um we've now gone this to the table over 10,000 solutions thousands of startups in the community um around 1,500 builders that come through the hub every month and we have about 220 ecosystem programs. Um this whole plan that we set out we basically achieved we had you know a range of accelerators we had a range of global cities and we started the the conversation with great leaders and now these programs that initially started a single you know hopeful ideas on the slide this is now an accounting of the active programs that exist.

Each one of these things is a separate program that has its own stat um its own set of goals and it's [clears throat] growing quite rapid and so the the total you know results so far kind of look like this you know uh the whole results look like this where you know really massive scales and success and this is what you can do with a movement. So this is not you know a startup company. This is not a specific um pro project or whatever. This is like a large event involving thousands of people and um and and thousands of organizations. In 2026 there will be another public city in March.

So we invite you to come back uh to winter at that point or you know stay here between now and then um and participate. If you're building a company or building a startup consider participating in the accelerator uh season and we just had a startup roll stop yesterday. There were a full regular um people participating. Uh there was peanut ended up winning for them. Um and we'll have the next one uh sometime 26 and come by the hub.

If you're here and haven't been strongly recommend to visit VF hub uh participate in a lot of the sessions that are out there or you know become a partner that can help the movement spread. So yeah, here's how you do it. Um oh we also ran the largest hackathon in LA. So it was like super super cool to see that you know movement that was very uh you know new managed to get to uh running the largest in town quite quickly. So yeah uh that's that's it about Chris Manzo.

Maybe I'll finish on one note which is um this big question around um yeah huge implications to join the movement. Um I'll end with this big question around this 20 year uh economic stability. The way that we see this developing is that in order to really improve the builder funnel across the board and and deliver this 20 years of ability, we have to learn from these great successes in history and we can take a page of their books. We can either fix a lot of bugs um and really change the the landscape here to enable um a lot of these companies to be built and stay here. we could make this kind of like go in between where you can fix a number of laws and still you know give up on holding the companies here and enable better international trade that's kind of the goal or or the third option is to do what places like Dubai and others have done which is to experiment with economic zones where you can run kind of a sandboxed economy at smaller scale try a totally different set of rules and and if they work then scale them to to the whole country and better yet instead of just trying one experiment you can run multiple experiments.

A place like Dubai has on the order of 50 different economic zones that are tuned for different industries and different structures. And something like that could be dramatically um significant in accelerating the growth of technology here. And and one of the cool things is that an economic zone which has historically been uh organized around a specific location in the world like in a specific city or a specific building or even sometimes in divide in like a floor of a particular building. Um, instead in crypto you could have a blockchain represent the boundaries of an economic system. So you could have a specific blockchain that represents a digital economic system.

And so this is what we consider to be like a ne next major move in this kind of political structure where we can build actual um economic institutions that are compatible with um you know the rest of the political world or the rest of the economic growth um with a reasonable structure for trade and a reasonable structure from how you you account the transactions and you can do it all on chain where you don't you know create this dual world where like there's like the paper law and the onchain law. No, no, no. It's like it's all code. It's the entire digital economic zone. um runs and operates the entire economy and that that is a major um uh recruitment.

So that's it. That's kind of like what we're up to from doing the movement on stuff by the hub. Uh great to see you. Thanks for having me. [applause]