Humanitarian Aid Revolutionized by Blockchain: Non Custodial Wallet for Basic Phones - Bangkok 2024

[Music] hello everyone I'm very happy today to share with you um what we are doing um we have been building digital public goods for the last three years we are a startup from Argentina and we're working with UNICEF in several projects but the most important one that I'm here to talk about is about how we are allowing them to send money globally very cheap to people without internet without smartphones and without L digital literacy they don't need even a bank account or to know anything about blockchain or crypto that is what we're doing behind the scenes so we already he from kipe all the corruption that it could be or all the operational challenges that humanitarian Aid distribution can have around the world so we are also going to add the the exchange rate the banking fees that humanitarians or organizations has to pay that is really um expensive and also the idea that there is no tability for them so whenever they have to go back to the donors and tell them what had happened with the money is really difficult as we have heard before so what happened with us is UNICEF reached us and they came with a problem saying we are sending $600 million per year and and the banking fees are incredibly high and this is not only the problem from UNICEF because the war food program is sending three billion 3.3 billion per year unhcr the refugee UN agency like 9 billions like big organizations have big operations lot of country offices many people uh receive twice the the humanitarian help other people don't receive any funds so we are actually bringing some technology to make the everything all the process and to end more efficient and they said we said of course we are working in blockchain this is totally possible to send money quicker and cheaper and more efficiently but they said okay but these people doesn't have uh they don't have smartphones and they don't have internet and there is when we said it's not possible because to make a crypto transaction we need internet so uh but either way we grabbed our team and we put us our minds to think a solution and is something that we actually came up with that is like account abstraction built on ethereum and in that way we're able to make like a smart wallet self custodial uh where the the person has their phone the their money and it it ended up being very easy to use because as these people doesn't have internet we're going to interact with SMS so they can go to the grocery store and buy something or check their balance even if they don't have um SMS or data in their phone so what we ended up building is not only for the end beneficiaries but it has a lot of um let's say benefits because they don't need to know about crypto they don't need to have a bank account they don't need they don't need to be on boarded like we are used to on board people in crypto but these organizations are also able to quickly upload a database with all the benit beneficiaries create their smart account and send money very easy the process looks like something like this where the sender here would be UNICEF or the worldw program or an organization then the the user will receive a SMS saying you have $50 to use and they can spend them right now in three different ways they go to the supermarket and they only provide their phone number they're going to receive an OTP or a temporary code and they're going to give it to the merchant in that way they're able to purchase bananas without having SMS data on their phones but they can also send money to a family member just typ in on their phone this very old phone saying send $1 to my mom or my this phone number this is even easier that we used to do before and also the cash out Network that they go and instead of banana they get the the cash so they can do whatever they need the critical point of all of this that sounds like magical and amazing even for us is the merchants because you need to convince them to receive a new payment method but they don't need a POS or a device or any investment they just need a web app not even download an app they need like to fill the blanks uh the phone number and the amount and we are starting like our next step is going to Venezuela where they are already transacting with crypto so we don't have to convince them they're already convinced and as this is a critical point not only are starting with Argentina that is my home country but with Venezuela this is how it looks like um the first prototype that we did even before piloting in Cusco Peru they receive a message saying you have an amount account you have a smart account and then this is the vendor when they fill out the amount and they can see all the transactions it's only a web app like a web page and this one is not showing but it doesn't matter we were ready we built it this year and we went to Cusco why because they don't have internet like 85% of the population outside the main city has to walk like two hours to get internet so they don't have any digital payment they're outside all of that so we went to to Cusco and we showed how people could go to the market and buy some groceries making the the transaction as low as 10 cents and even though the the fees were one cents of dollars that is why we are bulking or we're making all the transactions together we're like combining all of them so the the gas fee is even cheaper and the main um metric that we were wait we were looking at was the success rate that in this case was 100% why is this so important there are other Pilots that have been been done with blockchain and sending money uh to refugees or sending money to other countries and actually it was lower like six 60 or 80% because usually they have to download an app just a first step they have to have storage second they need to be to do a qyc sometimes they don't understand it's quite complicated blockchain sometimes so the idea here is so easy for the final you user they just need to have a phone a network coverage and understand that they can walk to the supermarket this is our team we're in Argentina we have a 20 people there are like 12 13 developers and we have an adviser that had been conducting some blockchain pilots in different parts of the world and worked in Africa with Mesa so we are actually getting very deep into this and and this is more about us so I'm going to go very very quickly we were funding by multiple organizations public private government we were featured in the STA Stanford social Innovations and semi-finalist at solve MIT because this is really quite Innovative like if we were going deep to the tech part is like amazing making this happen so that is uh that would be all I'm super happy to be able to share this with you today [Applause] thank you so much I have so many questions myself but [Music]