Global Adoption Where are we now

all right we're going to move on in the content schedule we're going to be doing rapid fire this morning we want to make sure everybody gets the appropriate amount of time we've got uh another panel on global adoption where are we now and our panelists will be erica who will be moderating [Music] my favorite people in the space i'm going to do an apology on camera because i literally missed her on the list because she's been working so much with us on the content preparation it's it's actually something that i missed myself so um apologies simona we love you anyway moving on you guys ready to go yeah yeah take it away so hello everyone i'm going to be moderating a fascinating panel on global adoption where are we now and a unique aspect of our panel is that community is an underlying factor in all of our backgrounds and that we are ever so scattered all around the world so before we dive in why don't we go around and share a short introduction um i'll maybe i you can share your background and what you're currently working on et cetera maybe i should start first um my name is erica and i'm the ceo and founder of crypto soul as a community building team focused on helping solid projects get decent exposure around the world through all kinds of events so i was based in seoul for the last 10 years but now i'm based in ho chi minh city vietnam and uh yes i'm planning to build a new community out here maybe ethereum community as well so yeah thank you and let's go around um maybe to chloe uh sure nice to meet everyone here i've seen a lot of familiar faces as well i'm chloe lewis i'm the founder of the marma j foundation here in antigua and barbuda what that is just an altruistic foundation where i try to use different web 3 technologies to support the local community i also work with the near i guess a blockchain community uh supporting their different community initiatives and helping with some of the artistic guilds there so that's a little bit about me okay juan hi everyone here juan from colombia super excited to see so many faces and to discuss this topic i have been moving the ball here around ethereum bogota also we are working in east columbia and right now i'm working for a status building communities in spanish and trying to solve problems for our communities so this is my background also i started in the ethereum community last year uh the pandemic was like a great experience an opportunity to connect virtually with some of you guys and also working in education so this is part of the things i'm excited about awesome thank you uh why don't we go with uh shoka okay all right my name is from nigeria uh yeah okay i entered the space 2017 uh when i think that that was the airdrop era and entering 2018 i saw i need to actually do more because the number of people there is there was a number of gaps between the blockchain space and education in nigeria so i decided to jump on the education wagon thanks to those away like we all went out as a team which i'm about 70 of at the time so we're doing a lot of advocacy learning teaching meetups now some at some point i decided okay let's let's jump on ethereum stay focused on it because i see the robustness of ethereum and how the community should be so i started from there and gradually i saw the developer gap so i started to do development education then that was all that were three bridge and since then we've been doing an amazing job we're doing course after course bringing people into the uh into the space teaching them about solidity getting them on to project and here we are thank you very much thank you angela hi hi um and i am currently working with git coin on kernel fellowship so mostly my work surrounds making the experience of each fellow a little bit better each day as much as i can before that i was working with matic network as a developer evangelist platform engineer so it has been fun my my time in blockchain so i started with uh i started with one of these hackathons my journey into blockchain and ethereum started with one of these hackathons which was india in 2018 and since then i could never really get out of the rabbit hole so i'm really excited to be here and also can i mention i'm loving these colors in the background i love me too it's a rainbow thank you i guess i'll go next my name is luke stokes uh i have a background in technology major in computer science i ran a company called foxycart for a long time e-commerce company so i was familiar with the payment space and got into crypto in 2013 so it's been a while for me i've been very excited about it went full time in the beginning of 2018 been involved in lots of different projects and in the space part of the steam now hive blockchain as a block producer there also part of eos dax i've been very passionate about decentralized autonomous communities so i'm very excited to hear about the different ways that communities are being built throughout the world with cryptocurrency i live in puerto rico with my wife and my family and i'm currently working on the field protocol as the managing director we're just trying to make cryptocurrency easier for everybody and i i love to talk about usability user experience as it relates to uh adoption so very exciting day today with everything that went on in the news with tesla and everything so it's going to be a fun conversation global adoption starts today in in a big way absolutely thank you so much um so speaking of adoption right and we're in different parts of the world right now um and what is the crypto adoption sentiment generally like in your respective region and you know i mean i think a lot of people are excited right now globally but still uh before this news happened maybe what was the general uh sentiment like maybe anyone ship in yeah sure so i think here in atlanta we have like two type of countries the countries that are experiencing the problem so you might read in the headlines what's going on in venezuela argentina so for people in those countries they already feel the pain of losing their poor purchasing power uh in colombia brazil we also we need to have be more creative because we have this like bullish market so people start to ask you about so what is bitcoin and then you start to explain what is a wallet so that's like a natural way to and this is like a really nice time to explain what is this all about but we want people to come for the for the bullish market but to stay for the technology and all the things that move around at the same time for those countries like i mentioned venezuela and argentina crypto has been a real solution for a real problem so we're super excited to see there how people are having an option to move around in an open economy so this is also a way of how we see in latin those countries that are for example die adoption in argentina is has been like a interesting case study for the work we are doing in a status for example we want to work with grassroots communities because as you uh know as we all know in this panel like the transaction fees are so high so we want to understand how to onboard more people and it's hard for us to tell them okay you can download a wallet but you need ether to start to interact with different labs so for example something i also want to mention that is really particular in our region is that we have some centralized exchange that has a lot of convenience so you have a trade-off between kyc so you can use your credit card and get your first crypto but at the same time you are using wallets that doesn't allow you to move to the world that we all like so peer-to-peer markets are also really interesting ones i think i would like to drop as a region is like that for example the things that are happening in different economies we have a lot of movement of people so remittances are something really interesting here you have people working in different economies so you can bypass those laws that doesn't make sense so you can use crypto to forward that so this is a way to kick start a conversation among our peers to let them know that this is like a new currency that you can use in a better world so that's the way that we try to educate people because i says first you can come here for the price you have to educate and stay to build different things so we have to think this funnel on how to direct people to the right community so i would love to know people you guys how you are doing with like a specific niche thank you anybody else so i'll speak quickly just on uh antigua just because i think it's quite different than what a lot of us in like the crypto space are used to in terms of like adoption uh you know being on crypto twitter a lot i feel like you get a lot of like this similar viewpoints of you know there's a bull market everyone knows what's going on everyone's excited uh whereas in antigua it's a very small country 80 000 people a local population and so a lot of times when you talk about blockchain or cryptocurrency uh a lot of those same news headings that were a lot of us are used to they don't really make it here um so a lot of the local population that might be a lot of times are too busy uh to you know to be on twitter all the time hearing about all this stuff so uh the crypto bubble even though it's getting larger and larger for a lot of us um here locally you talk about blockchain and people are it goes right over their head um so it really comes to that whole one-on-one trying to get each person and what juan was talking about the education aspect it really becomes a one-on-one educational like forum where you really got to make someone trust you before they can start trusting any protocol that you're talking about and you know from there it becomes okay well now they trust you as an individual how do you get them to actually put some economic resources into that and so i think that um a lot of like a lot of like what we've experienced maybe like you know 2016 2017 in this space is kind of how i try and look at things now where um we had a lot of you know in 2017 the ico market you know we've got a lot of scams coming out where you know here everything seems to be a scam unless it has like the government backing um it's all a scam bitcoin to scam ethereum's scam just because people don't know what it is and so yeah i think like what what hongdae was talking about like the educational aspect was really important um when people can't really go do their own research as easily as maybe where you see them i i have a similar experience in 2013 2014 when i started a bitcoin meetup in nashville tennessee and it was a lot of excitement and then when the price crashed from like 1200 down to 250 kind of everyone disappeared and so we're seeing a lot of excitement here in puerto rico crypto mondays is tonight and we have a great community that shows up every week it's really amazing but it's interesting because we have this dual community we have kind of a lot of the us citizens that come here for tax benefits and to build something amazing on the island and then we also have others that are local and are kind of like who are you all what are you coming here to do and so it's really amazing to see people coming to say we want to make this a test bed for how crypto can be used in puerto rico and we have those same kind of like you know i'll get an uber and they're like bitcoin what is that like oh my i found someone who's never heard of bitcoin amazing you know and i get to share my story and it's super fun but as you guys were both saying with the high fees and just the lack of education and just the complexity you know the big crazy public addresses and things i think we have a lot of work to do as a community so that we can accelerate that onboarding process beyond just you know one-on-one because i agree with you so much of it is that one-on-one kind of building relationships but obviously that doesn't scale very well and the problems in the world today need to scale quickly as far as what we can offer with cryptocurrency and blockchain and decentralized autonomous communities i think we have so much to offer we just have to be able to onboard people quicker than we are now okay i think uh i think we have similar experiences we all have when it comes to the old market craze and likes of them 2017 2018 you see a lot of people came into this space whoa the markets are booming everything is booming immediately the market go crashed down everybody left and it was as if nobody was actually in the space anymore he talked about bitcoin it's really like no scams comes come the government keep issuing regulations regulations regulations and uh now that the market starts up again i think about two weeks ago when uh was his name now when when the dodge issue was rising i see a lot of people who don't know anything about bitcoin shouting how do i buy those how do i buy it like oh now the market is not happy now i'm just going to keep going over like oh how do i buy bits go ahead by bits can i decrease keep going off for what but i would say that in nigeria and africa number the adoption rate is actually increasing because the truth is that a number of systems are still not working like the you want to transfer fund from nigeria abroad bringing phone back remittances is way worse like with cryptocurrency you get it immediate on the immediate like payments a lot of payments are now made in bitcoin i think last week we are yeah last week we had an issue where the central bank on nigeria is statements where saying banks should stop interacting with cryptocurrency like the market came crashing down a little well i i discarded a number of people became to innovate like between friday and today p2p transactions have increased platforms our personal innovator liking like an ngt ngt usdc now like a number so it shows that adoption is actually increasing while using crypto on daily basis although that's no rule that is need for education because number of people came for the bull run they would not get the right education they only came for the money and whatever by the time the markets dump on them they are the ones that will go out to meet the government hey i've been scammed i've been doomed but it was actually their fault because they didn't get a proper education that's why on a grassroot level we like we apparently have we apparently have like i think two three arms of education that is going on with the bridge with other groups i belong to like we do daily weekly weekly education we do monthly education levels we should have i don't know the day by time markets crash you understand that you need to keep up with the trends like the technology technology cryptocurrency thank you very much enjoy anything to add on your end yeah um it's very interesting to know about how uh governments and how people are perceiving crypto at at this point in time in india it's actually so for me personally it has been uh very contrasting wherein at one end uh virtually i'm engaged with the community who is extremely excited to build in crypto which is the kernel community and on the other end around me uh like right now what the news tells us is that the government might bring in a might pass in a law that will ban cryptocurrency that will perform a blanket ban on all cryptocurrency trading and withholding of any any sort of crypto not even stable coins so there is scare around me locally and virtually i see people so excited so this sort of contrast has been very interesting uh to observe for me personally and apart from that uh like in in my local community the the most difficult thing that i find in convincing people to get onboarded on crypto is uh the the fact that if you lose your private keys you lose your money this this the only this particular fact has been so difficult for people to digest because i was trying to onboard my sister in crypto and she was super excited about ethe because of the prices she was super excited about bitcoin but the fact that if she loses her hardware wallet she lose all her money was so indigestible to her because i do understand for credit card if she loses her credit card she can file in a complaint but for bitcoin there's no such thing as that and to this till this date i haven't been able to convince her that it's a it's a feature not a bug and i'm still struggling with that so it's a good thing that you have hundred percent control on it but then with great power comes great responsibility so this is one um like one thing that i want to share and also with governments banning cryptocurrencies i feel that uh especially in india i don't see the uh people would get uh people would not uh come into crypto like they'll stop uh trading or anything like right now for me around me in india i feel the only killer app on blockchain is the crypto trading that people do i feel there's a lot of volume being traded uh i i like i i don't remember talking about any dap to people the the technological aspects of ethereum and any great decentralized application that people are excited about it's mostly about crypto trading which is also pretty interesting to me so yeah i'm excited to see how this unfolds especially around me wherein the government is uh right on track to completely uh blanket ban the entire cryptocurrency and then in in the virtual environment where people are definitely not going to stop so that is like an interesting aspect to me thank you i agree with you um i think like for me i'm i'm based in korea and vietnam but then in korea and as you may have heard you know korea was a heavily trading country as a whole and uh when the kimchi premium was at its peak people were just like crazy about what makes money you know i think a lot of people are interested in invest investment not mostly on tech it's more about investment and i think like in korea it's very difficult to have find a very um i guess avid uh passionate open source uh developer group so it's very difficult to persuade them like hey this this thing actually does work like open source community is the deal but they don't really get that so i think it's more like a corporate uh enterprise based developer community it seems like so it's very difficult to have that community open sourced um who's passionate about it so i think that was a difficult thing to persuade and also uh you know now people are asking me bit when when dogecoin like when is it going to the moon right so it's very difficult to kind of fill in the gap between the understanding between you know um the the typical vcs who are not into crypto who just want to know about the price when is it going to go up is it going to go up um so it's very uh uh always i'm always in conflict first like internal conflict how to approach these people so i mean i think uh when we come to like persuading people not persuading about educating these people approaching um people uh how do you what's your story like in in getting them in interested in crypto and you know ethereum per se uh what is your what is your story behind it what do you do to to make them interested if i could go and take that one i i've had an interesting process where for eight years i've been talking about cryptocurrency on social media giving talks back in 2013 about how it's going to be more disruptive than the internet and i had a lot of friends that i know were following me the whole time like listening in going okay it's interesting i might you know get that at some point you know and and some of them did a lot of them did and they thank me often saying i'm so glad i listened to you back then but a larger number of them didn't and one thing that's been really interesting with the project i'm working on now but they have this way to like sign up for crypto you know they get themselves a few address and it's like then it works for ethereum it works for bitcoin works for everything and it's something they can kind of connect to and i was just really surprised in the last few weeks i've been kind of pushing my friends a little more like hey sign up and i'll send you like five bucks or something and the number of people that are like now i have my first crypto because you just sent it to me so just it reminded me something i've believed for a long time that just making it easy is a really really big part it has to be as simple as paypal and venmo and it's another reason i got involved in steam and hive because it was like it was easy to have this human readable address and i could blog to make crypto and i think like even early on the early faucets i love seeing those posts it's like a five bitcoin faucet right they have these faucets where you could just go and get crypto really easily and i think that's part of what works is just making this easy for people and at the same time like through that process educating them and helping them realize like you do have to understand seed phrases there's some personal responsibility involved and and yeah fees can get you if you don't know what you're doing so just hopefully making it easier i seems to be the key that i've found a lot of people respond yeah i i think i i flip way back 207 we started there was this pattern we use for education i think we still do that now like before before the general class we do talk about session of wallets then it was the air drop time so we do airdrop now i tell people that the truth is that you cannot separate education in crypto with incentives they go both ways like we do i think in our community rich community we should do the same thing tomorrow we're going to be having a class then on thursday are going to be having a quiz whereby after the quiz three people get to win something so that way if you want to win on thursday you come to class on tuesday so we we are trying to marry both the education and in central and we are doing that since 2017 it is after you've learned about the all incentive airdrop setting wallet then now start teaching you the in-depth of blockchain that's that by then you and your first one dollar it gives you an interest you want to learn more that that doesn't work for us and it's still working yeah i i really like that approach actually uh it just occurred to me that this is something i do with my friends as well wherein uh so this was one thing that got me interested in bitcoin in the first place when i when i read the mastering bitcoin book so it had this little thing that that is when it occurred to me so you it so getting a private key is not like you're opening an account you're not signing up to a page you can basically roll the dice 256 times and you have a private key so that was one uh like a very little educational experience for me which was super interesting so the private key doesn't really have to be on a paper or any account or anywhere it has to be just in your head you can take it anywhere in the world with you so that is the one thing that i usually share with people so this is like their first little lesson into cryptocurrency and that is what gets them excited so i'm saying them and plural in a way that i have educated a lot of people but it has been two people successfully so i'm pretty proud of that so i'm really proud of that so uh hopefully uh i can find some more interesting ways of getting people excited about this using education and incentive that is a really good uh combination i will share my approach when it comes to storytelling so two weeks ago one high school teacher that she knew that i was working on a crypto company she wanted to invest for the first time so we arranged a top four aunties so i took like five aunties and told them what's like the thing with ether and the the best analogy that worked was like to compare that to the forex in colombia people are used to travel to the states or to europe so you have they have this idea of how much is one euro or one us dollar so i start telling them that this is a digital economy so you need to you need to have this this cash and the next analogy that worked really well was the uber search price system so i have to explain them how you need to pay for your decentralization and then that kickstarted all the conversation about what is important to know you to own your data so using this storytelling for them to how you travel to a different world to a different country is to enter to a digital economy so i was doing this so you go to a mall here in colombia is normally you have some exchanges so you go your colombian pesos and you should trade that for dollars so i explained them now that we have a peer-to-peer marketplace so you can have like an uber that they can give you some money so a start to play with these analogies an example have been super easy for them to grasp and also here a particularity that we have is like our own teaching whatsapp are super active so we want to create like an army of aunties that are going to reply that using memes so i invite you to play with this storytelling with examples and also to identify the people that are going to be like the to grow the wall like the snowball this type of active people is key to identify ambassadors yeah i think i really enjoy the the marriage of like education and incentives um i think a lot of times though like in the crypto community we kind of go straight to economic incentives which is not always how a lot of people in like everyday life are incentivized especially here in antigua i mean people are are just used to sometimes not having as much as what we're used to having and so you know sometimes i think it's always great to use like nfts as well um and so i think it gives a visual representation to some of the things that we're used to seeing digitally and we understand by using something like an nft where it's okay you can use someone else's wallet um and just here try and create this this token drag and drop something create some sort of nft um send it around and a lot of times teaching the simple um things that we're used to okay this is how you tend to transfer uh it's going from one wall to the next uh where instead of being economic incentives it could be simply you know creating a card for a friend and sending it to their address and having them receive it um where and then maybe that will get them to okay i i don't mind making an account and i might lose my private key but it might only be a dollar in there to make some pictures for some friends and so a lot of times it could be a short or a smaller stepping stone instead of going straight from uh a centralized bank account into like a completely decentralized world that's kind of what i usually try and use to kind of take smaller steps for some people absolutely and we've been like building like crazy all these you know palace have been building and you know been educating and uh and i'm sure you had your hurdles and your limitations that you faced uh while you were doing that and can you share some of your experiences um as our last question and maybe you can share also what your future plans are and maybe overcoming that i guess i'll jump in uh i think the biggest thing has been just the booms and you know busts of the token cycles you know as people go wait you know it went up and then it went down and i sold for a loss and i lost money and trying to get people to not think in just terms of economics but think in terms of why it's important you know really understand what they're getting involved in and then as i mentioned earlier just usability making it much much much easier for people to use cryptocurrency and that's uh with the human readable addresses and payment requests and memo data contextual data about transactions this is the type of stuff i'm working on personally because i really do think making it easier will make a big big difference uh so just quickly here i think the biggest issue has been trying to bring adoption just through usability um so just the you know you hear you can't really just go to an exchange or just go to atm and just purchase as easily and so just getting like people understand that you know you can use this to purchase something is sometimes not is pretty difficult so i think what i'm personally working on next is trying to get uh more merchants just to trust uh accepting it so that you know the everyday person walking around can actually go into a shop and exchange you know cryptocurrency for like a sandwich which i think really ties you know some usability and some uh value to the cryptocurrency we use yeah i think uh martian adoption is actually something that i'm actually interested in i've mentioned it over and over and over but at some point i told people not only when adoption education increases but an adoption would not be easy because the my chance does not even understand the number of people that i want to use as long as you understand so getting getting the right spot for education is still something uh that like i thought people are deaf coming and i said build products that people want to use like now we're working on building a chess a chess game like beauty actually that accepts people that make people posing like defy defy based chess game like something that people use every day like when you get when you get to the point where people wake up in a day and easily pick up a dab just disabled use that whatsapp for whatsapp whatsapp app it makes it easier for adoption to flow to flow well but now i remember we still have we have a lot of disconnects between the development parts the people then cryptocurrencies just in the middle so we have a lot of traders who does not care about what happened to the market they are just a trade so we need to marry the three together that is one of the biggest challenges i think we still have now i will add super quick the off-ramp part a lot of people ask okay so i put this how can i get this back so peer-to-peer market for me is the answer because people are have this sense of okay i invest one and i got two i earn one and i can do something else with that so that overall has to be super smooth angela last words just that i have really been enjoying this conversation a lot and in terms of um if if it's in terms of educating the uh like in the community around me i feel my approach uh has been like i said education and also one thing is that uh empowerment in terms of technology is what i really like to uh deliver in whatever pitch i'm giving around blockchain so if uh so like spinning up your own full note and being mindful of the fact that you're basically being a part of the network the network that on the the very network that you're exchanging your value on is i feel if you uh basically sit back and think about it it's pretty powerful thing and to be able to be a part and also use the same thing that you're on it's it's uh it's the most my it has been the most mind-blowing thing for me and i feel that is the one approach that i use empowerment in terms of technology and value thank you so much guys we need an hour to talk about this thank you and see you next time thank you so much everyone thank you thank you thank you thanks everybody