For The World: How ReFi will Reach Critical Velocity - Buenos Aires 2025

Hello. Hello. Going after David is both a blessing and a curse. You did amazing, David, as always. Um, rich and critical philosophy.

Um, philosophy, sorry. I'm actually really excited to speak here. I think, um, going right after scientist, I want to really focus on the you builders are what I think is needed to for refi to reach critical velocity. And let me explain how. Um, my objective is quite simple.

I want to inspire you to believe that right now at this moment is the best moment ever to go allin on your impact project. I um want to quickly recap this opportunity and challenges that I've experienced over eight years building in web 3 and reflect a bit on the progress that we've made as an industry as the public goods kind of refi space and then focus our actions together to have a couple of breakouts. So quick 101 on refi. Refi stands for generative regenerative finance. It's a financial approach that focuses on holistic systems on regenerating our social, economic and natural resources.

Um in short, it is um there's an old version. Okay. Um but I think a better way to explain regenerative finance is through this visual. Um on the left side, you see traditional degenerative um systems that take take and don't give back. um they're trying to do whatever they can to extract as much as possible without going to jail.

Um sometimes they still go to jail, sometimes they get a plea, whatever. But these are the traditional systems and then um we realized that over time that these purely degenerative capitalistic systems are destroying our world. So our global leaders aligned on the sustainable development goals to say okay this is where we should be channeling our energy to. Now, a lot of the sustainable development goals are about reducing harm, um putting less oil in the ocean, putting um having less hunger. Um but in reality, we could flip the question and be like, why do we even need oil in the ocean?

Um we don't want that. We want to focus on the good things, the things that actually create value. So, regenerative development goes beyond just sustainability. Um a friend of mine he has this joke he calls it if someone asks how's your wife and your relationship doing you say it's sustainable how does that feel doesn't feel great right the state it's not healthy it's not growing but if something is regenerative it's growing it's getting better it's getting smarter over time and as a result more effective and better so in regenerative systems you're reusing energy you're accelerating and you're focusing on a holistic picture and that opportunity for solving these big problems is also really big. The total addressable market or the gap between what resources we need to accomplish our goals that our global leader set out and where we are today is in the trillions.

Um around four four trillion today but growing towards 6 trillion a year by 2030. So you as a builder if you're look thinking about okay where should I be focusing my energy I invite you to focus on the big problems because the reward will also be big and to get there I want to focus on two parts in this regenerative um development cycle where I think the refi space right now is still lacking and I think it relates to David's talk as well um one of this is the word effectiveness it's about doing the right thing in the right way at the right moment u we're not really good at that but then also using renewable energy flows um using something that generates more value, more knowledge, more capacity over time that allows us to grow because this is what we want. We want this this feedback loop that continues to grow and expand. We want to regenerate people which then leads to the regeneration of ecosystems which allows us to generate success which allows us to um create economic upside which allows us to fund bigger, better, more effectively. But this is what it looks like in reality.

I think you're all familiar with this with this curve. This is one new crypto project. You think it's going to change the world. You put all your money into it and then over time it goes down and down and down and you're like, "Oh no, there's this big big breakthrough. I'm going to buy now."

And it goes down again. Um it's hard, right? It's rough. Um it's not easy to not get this graph. It's much easier to get this graph just like it's hard to start a startup.

Um but I think there's some elements to it that if we tweak them right, this graph will look more like the previous one. [snorts] Um so the first one is this lack of business success resulting in economic success. Um we're getting better and better over time at get getting better at regenerating people and regenerating ecosystems. We're measuring more. We have AI now.

We're I mean we're not great at it yet, but we're learning and we're making really good progress. But because of the nature of these public good questions, we often are afraid to tie it back into business and economic success. And then the result is that we end up with an industry that's completely grant- driven and as a result is often underresourced relative to traditional more degenerative capital systems that go all in. they go hard, they get the money and they and they execute. And I want to make sure that we can outperform them.

So um how do we do that and how do we break this downward trend? Um I think we need to then go back to the very beginning of what defines success for a business and it comes down to creating value for a customer and doing it in a way that generates more value for your organization, network, protocol, whatever it is. Um so solving problems efficiently or effectively and then I had a couple of sleepless nights and I'm like why did all the things that I start fail after a couple of years a couple of months and I went back to this was I creating value for people effectively. So this is a picture. That's why it's so blurry because it's old.

Um 2019 2020. Um back in my home country, Curisau. Uh we created an impact Dow called Curid Dow. We were giving communitygoverned um funds away. [snorts] Um and it started really nice.

Um we got a couple of money from Dowstack, which was one of the older um DAO protocols and we were like, okay, what if everybody could decide what we fund in our community? Great experiment. Um but in order to do give away, I think we gave away like $4,000. To do that, we had to build interfaces from scratch. We had to onboard people into both MetaMask on their mobile and then our scrappy UI on the desktop.

So, it was really tough to get them in. And then once they got in, because of um the state of Ethereum back then, sometimes they had to pay $50 in gas fees to vote. Now, trying to expla explain this to there was a lady in there from she was 72 years old. trying to explain to a lady that she needs two devices and then pay $50 to vote on what cleanup we're funding. It was just really hard.

And then once the projects got the money, they needed to go to like a shady business in the city and kind of trade it as like cash for money. Um, and that created dangerous situations, but it also just created a horrible user experience. So while we res while we were managed to allocate resources to the community, the value we created relative to the effort we had to put in was just really really really bad. Um and that's why logically we couldn't keep doing it. We couldn't keep growing it um further.

But now um things are different. Times have changed. We've made so much progress in the past 5 years that right now the same experiment probably has 20 or 100 times more chances of succeeding and growing further. Um, starting with this neutral efficient coordination infrastructure, right? I mentioned $50 per per transaction.

We don't have that anymore. Ethereum is easy to use. It's cheap to use. Um, who has ever spent more than $10 on a single transaction in gas fees? Only seven, eight hands, maybe.

Who spent more than a dollar on gas fees? Now, let's flip it around. Who has ever spent $50 on a transaction? Lucky. Oh, that's too many people.

Crap. [laughter] But [snorts] I I can assure you that the people that join the industry today will never have to pay $50 for a transaction unless they do something really crazy. But for the majority of users, it will be near instant and cheap. We also have tools and protocols from account abstraction that allow you to circumvent all the private seat phrase. um f friction to AI automating us and helping us to ZK technology like self um allowing for zero knowledge verification of identity and all of these things are building blocks also the environment is totally different when we did these things in the early days crypto was um scary it was something for criminals back in 2017 18 if you told people I'm in crypto they would either think that you're selling drugs online or that you're laundering money or they're going to ask you what meme coin do I to invest in.

Um but times are different now. There's institutions. We just had um UNICEF here. We just have we have UNDP involved. Um it is a different age now.

People serious people are taking this taking this industry very serious. That creates opportunities for us to create real solutions. Um another edge that we have over those traditional degenerative systems was they were doing it for themselves. They were doing it for their own benefit and they didn't care about any of us in this room. And that's our edge because we do care about all of us.

We do care about the world. And it gives us this collaborative culture advantage. Um we're creating open-source technology that can be reused. We're building in public. We are um researching and sharing just like what David explained.

Um and there's also increasingly getting support systems that just allow you as a builder to get that traction that you need to keep building and get started. Over those years, I I made a simple kind of checklist of things that how I want to be building and how I think it is relatively real and easy to build something good. Um, it all starts with identifying something that bothers the crap out of you or that bothers the crap out of people around you. Find something that people really care about. And if it's not something that you care enough about, it's going to be really challenging to build something meaningful.

Um, back in the degenerative systems, you would look at something that you don't care about, but you think could make a lot of money and you would optimize for that. I don't think that's the way to go anymore. So, look for a problem that you deeply care about. Um, then build a simple solution. It doesn't even have to be technical.

Um, it could be something that you do manual at first and understand the problem. Understand why it persists, where it comes from, who is having these problems, who would really care about solving these problems. Because once you do that and you learn from these early engagement, it's then that you start to form that that knowledge that you need to build a proper solution. And once you have that, then you can leverage all these resources from Ethereum to AI to really optimize and scale that solution. Um, and then the more important part or I think a really important part is then you claim your fair share of revenue.

And it's up to you to decide if you want to put a good share of that in your pocket. But I would recommend to reinvest it, pay it forward, invest it into others, invest it into public goods. Um, but don't be afraid to charge for usage once you create a lot of value because with that we can create the feedback loops. We can create more resources. um a friend of mine, Alor, she she is a o OG Bitcoin um BCH supporter and she was very um vocal about how she views cryptocurrencies and she always said using a cryptocurrency is like a political statement.

Every time you decide to participate in a system, use an app, you're supporting or reinforcing a system. So if we're able to become the power users, the reinvestors into regenerative solutions, those systems are going to keep growing and we're going to keep that feedback loop growing as well. Um so to help that we recently launched um Ethereum for the world. It's a platform that brings together use cases, learnings, media, and programs to accelerate builders like you that are building um SDG aligned or regenerative aligned solutions on Ethereum. And we recently ran our first program together with Gitcoin, um, Salo, Ma, and the Ethereum Foundation where we allocated $150,000 to what we called solution development grants, which were projects that were already solving real world problems, have the capacity to make revenue, are already making revenue, but are missing some development work to get there.

So every grant has a combination of measurable grant um development but also the focus on growing their capacity to get more resources in and grow their their user numbers. Um we issued 19 grants. The entire process took about four weeks. We really leveraged AI and and the latest tech. Um especially Karma Gap which is a platform for grantee accountability and ecosystem support allowed us to make these decisions way more informed and way quicker.

um and really gave me that confidence that hey there are a lot of good projects out here and they have real potential. Um so what we're looking for here really is people that are ready to accelerate. Um if you are a builder that already has a project or has a vision for a project, reach out to us. If you're a funer that wants to invest into people like that, reach out to us. Um next year we hope to create more programs.

We also hope to open a fund um to really accelerate and put our money where our mouth is in these regenerative systems. Before we end, you might be wondering why is this guy standing on this location in a football shirt. Well, um yesterday was a very special day for me um coming from a small Caribbean island. Yesterday we became the smallest country in the world to um qualify for the for the football world cup. Um, thank you.

And it reminded me about how inspiring human progress can be to others. Even if you didn't care about football, you were invested in this and it made you proud and it made you want to do back to the island and give back and what's so and I want to do that as well. So, um, it's too early to announce it. It's not really really live, but I couldn't stop myself from doing it today. Um, we recently moved back to the island after 10 years in Europe and we're working with the government and local fintech industry to turn the island of Kurissau, it's a small Caribbean island, beautiful ocean, um, to turn it into a hub for onchain innovation and on boarding.

So, if you're interested in spending some time on the island, um, or consider incorporating your your company here for innovation purposes, we have everything from licenses to to nice beaches to great food and a very diverse society. Um, so please feel free to visit onchain island.co or scan the QR code. Um, which is a small form where you can tell us what you would like and we're going to make that for you. Um, so dream it up.

dream what your perfect onchain location would look like and I think we can co-create it together and get out of those negative loops. Thank you so much. [music] [applause]