DAOFest – Luuk Weber, CuraDAO

it's actually quite fun because without you pet I wouldn't have been here I think I still remember back at Eric on when I thought this was all like a joke and it couldn't really be real and then you reminded me of no let's do it I'm a seed planter I'll get this done just do it and now I'm standing here I'm really really really happy to present what we've been doing in Curacao for the past six months so I'll wait for it to note a little bit that's a bad dongle your dangos not working doesn't seem to work it always happens that tech conferences awesome so this is a picture of Curacao it's a Caribbean island where I come from it's a beautiful beautiful island but we have a lot of challenges and we hope to solve some of these waited ow so for point of reference this is where Curacao it's it's in the Caribbean in the southern part just north of Venezuela and the islands exists of 160 thousand inhabitants it's about 70% locals and then 30% either Dutch or other outsiders but aren't really Outsiders anymore so the reason because we have a lot of Dutch is because we're a former Dutch colony we became independent within the kingdom about nine about nine years ago so we're still figuring out how to be a sovereign nation and how to have your own identity the good part about cured charisa and our past with with the Netherlands is that we have a really high GDP compared to the region we have very well-developed financial services industries offshore and we have a lot of tourism and we have a big oil refinery there's like the three main pairs of our nation but the bad thing that already comes with this is a huge divide between the rich and the poor a huge divide between the white colonists and the local population which leads to a lot of distrust in group preference nepotism and because we're on the island and were used to being separated from the rest of the world we have a very inward looking mindset and we're not really seeing how connected the world is nowadays so this year and let's say the past four or five years we have been running into a lot of problems one of our biggest economic partners was Venezuela most of the most of you might know what's happening there so we lost about 20% of our GDP a big part of that was because the oil refinery which was operated by the defendant Sweden's close down which took about 3,000 jobs from mm people labor force which led to an unemployment rate of 21% so we went from 13 to 21 percent in about two years it led to a little internal conflicts and even more inequality because a lot of people without a job now started to blame the people that do have a job for for not reacting in appropriate manner and this only reinforce the outdated mindset of no we got to defend what's ours and keep everybody out and fight fight for our own curacao identity so I wanted to reference a small part of the of the national anthem of Curacao it states bangdu Nadine owes priority is La Paz para la Kano's una forza piscina triomphe a-- which in english means that is do our part for the islands prosperity and others unite forces so we can all triumph this sounds beautiful but the reality this doesn't happen at all so when I first got in touch with Taos and crypto in general for me it was a Salvation because it was able to pour my talents into this digital realm and get researchers out of it it was able to follow my dreams and I think this relates a lot to what we're seeing in Curacao and how we could empower even even more what's already happening there so one of the big movements is that different small communities are now popping up for example permaculture communities and creative communities also we have a next generation of quite tech-savvy people like most individuals nowadays a teenager's grow up with fortnight and selling things online and they're used to it and we have new sectors emerging for example the tech sector is now finally becoming a tengan curacao which opens up a lot of opportunities so why is that if everything is quite going into the right direction already why would we need a Dow and it's it's mostly for this we want to create an an accessible ecosystem where different groups races and organizations can come together to contribute and benefit from the development of our island so it's especially about lowering the barriers for collaboration it's not per se about starting kick-starting and reinventing the wheel we just want to empower the people that are already doing good and kind of keeping them safe from all the nepotism and corruption and all the other things that are holding him back so we started a pilot in August after about six months of talking locally with the people like hey would you be interested in something like a now we organized the Curacao blockchain week in April where we organized a two-day workshop about dowse and then we introduced the idea and then in August we launched the Dow with three main selling points to the local population the first one being transparency having your decisions and your monetary policy written out on a blockchain is a big game changer for these kind of islands people are used to having everything in like a black box and you have no idea what's happening nobody trusts the government know they even trust your own cousin with money so having this all in a transparent way really creates a lot of trust and it's about inclusivity it's not about who you are who you know you're free to come up with proposals you're free to participate in this discourse around different topics and it's really I mean from a Western point of view it might be easier like oh yeah everybody can participate and be an entrepreneur but this really isn't the case in Curacao it's quite hard to become part of something and once you're part of something you'll be peer pressured into only be part of that specific group and I'm finding it's about efficiency we have a lot of outdated institutions on the island we barely use digital products we don't have mobile banking we only have digital banking which takes like two days we don't have ecommerce so there's a lot of stuff that's just much faster and much more efficient when using it now so that a couple of numbers from the pilot that we did in total we had 30 43 members which all had voting power and all participated in the voting of the Cure now we had a quite a diverse group our youngest member was 16 and the oldest was 74 which is already quite interesting when you see the crowd at normal tacky fans it's like thirty to fifty three to sixty it's like a specific niche but because we're focusing on things that everybody cares about we get such a diverse group of people so in total we did seven projects and distributed over $2,200 in the six month period was a total of eleven eight we did sex meetups and to researches so that if a couple of pictures of the of some of the project so this is huge for climate it's a group of Curacao teenagers who are a perfect use case for a doubt like a Daoist actually what they need they told me they have been doing cleanup for six months they worked with different institutions but they haven't been able to get their t-shirts and their bags and their cleaning equipment because nobody really takes some serious everybody just treats them as oh yeah you can help us and then you get a thumbs up and you go to school again and you do your things they are too young to start a foundation so they can't raise their own money they're not rich enough to kind of pour in their own money so they were looking for a solution where they can keep on contributing to what they're doing while not having to rely on the old system to kind of feed them with resources so it took some time to unboard them in the beginning they were like what are you talking about and after the third time then I go right let's do it they submitted a proposal for about three hundred dollars to purchase different things like their t-shirts and clean up material and then this is not even a full group they ended up with like 70 people coming and it's all through social media and it really shows that the next generation is so much better at this than we are I mean we're here with ten people it's quite interesting to see that these younger generations would Instagram and they only know this they spam each other they hype each other up they only know FOMO liking and sharing and you want to be there and this is exactly what we want to achieve it has to be super cool to be part of the solution well I mean if you take a look these are the cool kids if the cool kids do it everybody will follow so this for me was maybe even the biggest win of the whole pilot we also did some meetup so for example this is the group if you look closely you could see some like it's a very diverse group a lot of girls a lot of different ages different nationalities and this for me was the whole beauty of curatu it brings together people that would have wouldn't have been in the same room if it wasn't because of this safe space to come together so a couple of learnings it works it actually does stuff we could have imagined it but in the beginning we started with 40 people and then we got three different organizations involved so that's another point that the three people that joined afterwards joined as an organization so not as an individual but like as a group of people who together want to do a project people and culture over tech the tech side is not interesting to anybody besides us when you talk to them they barely care about tech and what they do care about is things like future of work future of organization what is governance who are you these are the questions that they care about and something we did for example when we organized these workshops in Curacao we don't say blockchain or web tree we say future of organizations or future of you or whatever communication is key both to the outside parties but also internally one of the biggest challenges we had was trying to get keeping the communication loops close in a way that people know what's happening and where they can contribute currently we have not enough tools so we're doing stuff like even Facebook groups to just engage these people but it really is about communication and it's super hard nowadays also some of the people are overseas and it's just a big challenge but you need to focus on it and then the biggest learning I think is that you need to standardize first if you're standardized and you can be centralized if you open up in your like you can do anything people will do nothing they need to know what game in my play you don't want to play like monopoly without rules you want to kind of agree like hey if you do this then you get this and then people can make the thought for himself like a it's just worth it for me yes or no do I want to be part of this but now it was just too fake for a lot of people like hey become part of kurd be the solution or like solution to what like everything and I okay yeah cool I'll check it out and I never do it so really standardized a little bit first get a common agreement come and understand of what is happening what we want to solve and I move forward we had quite some barriers as well as you can imagine the complexity of dowse that's not only the technical part but just explaining it to people already I mean Digital cooperative that is easy to us but the whole digital organization part is already super confusing a cooperative for somebody something that only maybe 5% of the people are part of so it's still really complex to to explain to people what a Dow is even to the point that we're now evaluating which you need to explain everything first India just get them rolling in and along the way teaching and what they're part of then the technical limitations just et reom gas fees another thing that's for us is quite okay like you pay some 40 cents but for a lot of people that's the barrier between voting and not voting or participating and not participating education and cultural gap something that was really interesting is that we have this common group where we share ideas and one thing we figured out is that the culture in Curacao isn't made for sharing you're not used to sharing your ideas and coming up with new ideas so people didn't feel comfortable to just tell what they what they were thinking it it's something that they need to work on first and to feel comfortable to share what they're worried about their ideas so it's both educational and cultural and that there's no local legal framework and no crypto on and off ramps the legal framework or something we could easily avoid by just putting it on to for example in Vermont but a trip the local crypto on and off ramps is something we really need to solve it's an interesting solution it's an interesting situation because we're our currency is back to the dollar so all our transactions need to be processed through an American bank and American banks aren't too happy about small Caribbean islands dealing with crypto so this made it really hard for us but there's also a lot of good stuff coming in for the future so what we want to focus on there's a better user experience for example translating into the local language using currencies that are closer to their heart so more so have their own unit of account of the local nation so current currently we use deuterium but that's super confusing explaining to a 16 year old that doesn't even deal with dollars what this SSA does has $300 word and they need to a spec 0.4 and it just doesn't work and it needs to be mobile friendly and we want to have better on boarding besides that we want to have real impact it shouldn't be all over the place anymore so you want to have some formal partners people that already know how to make an impact so we can learn from them and learn together with them instead of finding everything out ourselves we want to focus on the SDGs how many there's enough time two minutes so and you want to become data-driven so we can actually make decisions on objective references instead of like subjective oh I think your ideas go or not and like I said standardized so go quick a bit faster one of the projects were working on to fix the unit of account issue is creating a stable coin for Curacao it's called Kira die it's an it's basically a fork of the normal die so what you do is you lock up regular die and it and under contract allows you to mint cura die at the same rate as the central bank issues guilders so the local currency the good thing because our currency is back to the dollar it's a fixed back so at any point you can just go there lock your $1.00 mint or 175 guilders and if you feel like you want to change it back you can just send it back to the contract mint your curio die and take your die out now there's a small transaction fee in the middle about 0.03 cents for every cure data to mint and this goes as a donation to the cure it out and finally this is what we what we're now brainstorming for for a second iteration of cure now you can already see it's a bit more specialized so in the in the middle it's just about reducing inequality and working together and on more to the edges you can have sub doubts which are focused on specific real-world impacts so for example technology an entrepreneurship or well-being and even further than that you can have smaller organizations or groups of people like in a corner used for climate a group of teams they can also have their own down on their own organization and work with multiple of these sub house to reach their goals and then will participate in participating in a hackathon in Odyssey it's based in Colonia on April 3rd to 5th we still have two spaces left for our team we're building a data Commons which collects the feedback from local from the local population puts it into a data Commons for people to use to build projects upon so they can use the needs from the ecosystem to then build solutions that people actually need a couple of solutions of suggestions so connected connected out to stuff that people care about don't connect it to something that you care but really look at what is the ecosystem needing provide a really smooth landing and finally just do it just do it it's it's about learning and iterating nobody is an expert nobody knows what they're doing so I just get it started and people will learn and together you can you can get it rolling so that was it thank you I want to quickly thank Felipa for giving me the chance to speak today and organizing everything here thank the stack for supporting Kyra down this pilot your support has been amazing if you want to contact me Twitter looked out or follow curatu on Twitter and if you want to donate you can send your C 20s to cure doubt it that was it thank