Iran Unchained - Web3 meets the Iranian Revolution

hello um thanks Sean my name is Amin solamani today I'm presenting woman life Freedom uh on behalf of Iran Unchained I'm out of breath right now because I just went and downloaded all of this I had to run all the way out into the parking lot for my tethering to work but we're all set so thank you for joining us uh trigger warning this contains brutal violence and blasphemy if that's not okay with you you might not want to see this her name was Masa amini she was stopped by Iran's morality police for showing her hair and then she was beaten to death in their custody on September 16 2022. her death triggered our Revolution her name is our code this is Niko's shot code on me she's burning her head scarf on a car inspired by maso amini's death she went to a protest she was missing for 10 days before her parents found her body in a morgue they were not allowed to autopsy her body which is usually what happens when there has been rape or the organs have been removed and sold the officials said she fell off a roof despite her nose and skull being bashed in her body was forcibly buried far away to prevent a large funeral in Tehran her parents were arrested at her funeral and forced to give public confessions that Nika killed herself jumping off the roof Iranians are risking their lives protesting to send a message they do not want the Islamic Republic they reject the Islamic values of being anti-women seeing them as breeding stock and justifying executing prostitutes and uh homosexuals their anti-life promoting child martyrdom and executions without due process and anti-freedom with a government that has full authoritarian control uh the chart on the left shows the number of people who would vote to keep or not keep the Islamic Republic if they were able to vote in a referendum and this is people in Iran so 80 percent of people do not want the Islamic Republic this number is actually up 10 just in the last two and a half years and another interesting stat from this set of polls is if you look at the male female breakdown in the punishment section uh females are twice as likely to prefer revolutionary executions for the perpetrators of violence of the Islamic Republic and note that is not the death penalty by a fair Court that's just executions revolutionary Style be our voice the Iranian government shut down the internet Iranians risk their lives when they speak up there's 15 000 Iranians in jail including most of the leaders athletes professors musicians artists Community leaders and so it falls on Iranians outside of Iran to be their voice I'm gonna play a video for you guys right now a quick intro to this video uh this was uh these are all scenes filmed inside of Iran in the last six months and this song is called the Sherlock means whip and the point of me showing you this is to show you the general cultural shift that's been taking place you can follow along on the papers that we handed out the lyrics foreign [Music] foreign good job [Music] [Music] head job so uh that was a song by too much he has uh 1.2 million insta followers he's pretty popular he's my favorite rapper now and he is also being tortured in prison where he's been in solitary confinement for the last four months he has a broken leg broken hand can barely see out of one eye and probably has brain damage uh videos of his torture were leaked on purpose to send a message to his followers because all of the people that are supposed to be leading this revolution are in jail we are left with whoever is outside of the country to try and rally International support uh here we have some of the most outspoken uh supporters of the uh Revolution we have Reza pachlevy the exiled Crown Prince of Iran Massey Ali najad who's a journalist and an activist who plays Bronwyn in Lord of the Rings rings of power you might have seen her it's a great show uh and Hamed ismailian who is a dentist and now also an activist uh there is a Munich security conference a couple weeks ago the Islamic Republic was not invited and in their place Reza Massi and nazanin were able to go and promote the cause of Iranian freedom to other world leaders there was also Global protest in solidarity uh with the protests and Strikes in Iran this is one from Berlin that had 80 000 attendees and it was organized by Hamed ismailun uh after the USA assassinated General soleimani no relation uh Iran responded by blowing up Ukraine international flight PS 752 comed's wife and daughter were on the plane and he has made it his life mission to achieve Justice for his family and you can see this meme how it started how it's going how it started is he was basically protesting in the streets of Toronto by himself and three years later he's organizing rallies of close to a hundred thousand people the goal of these protests is to overthrow the Islamic Republic and establish a secular government aligned with woman life Freedom you can see on the chart that uh this is for people who uh answered that they do not want the Islamic Republic they ask what do you want and they have different preferences presidential Republic parliamentary Republic constitutional monarchy but all of those have in common that they are secular forms of government personally I don't have a strong preference I just want the Islamic Republic gone happy to work with anyone who shares that goal let's talk about how ethereum and web3 are helping big thanks to vitalik for being an early supporter of this cause uh just like he was you know Slava Ukrainian like day two of the invasion of Ukraine uh first and foremost money uh the real has lost a lot of value uh pretty pretty quickly uh Iranians have been pulling their money out of banks buying dollars gold Bitcoin really whatever they can get their hands on they're trying to eliminate the senior age revenue for the government that is abusing them and they're also trying to protect themselves against their bank accounts being closed down because if you're protesting and you get caught they'll go steal your money one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in Iran is tether usdt on Tron and I still think ethereum deserves some credit for that because tether or Tron is basically a fork of ethereum so you know ethereum still did all the work um another way that uh web3 and ethereum are helping Iranians is through digital art nfts these are all nfts that I bought from Iranian women in Iran I went on a shopping spree on Christmas I meant to buy five thousand dollars of art seventeen thousand dollars later you know uh I bought a lot of Art and I only bought maybe something like two percent of all of the art that people recommended I buy after they saw I was going shopping one of the artists I missed that I remember seeing her art and thinking it was really good uh died uh suspiciously after she tried to exit the country later that week she was going to Belgium and they stopped her at the airport and no one ever heard from her again so one of the things that web3 can still do to help is social recovery for wallets because it would be cool if I could buy her art but I don't know where that money is going I don't know if it's going to her family or if the wallet's just lost other ways that web3 and ethereum can help these are coindesk headlines so consensus offered a grant program to help Iranian women learn solidity they were offering classes open to Iranians and offering scholarships to cover the cost of the course oh wait uh they banned everybody from the class because of uh worrying about sanctions okay well at least we have coin grants where Iranians are able to fundraise on get coin for a Farsi language solidity course actually they also kicked off uh that Grant from getcoin okay well we have co-ops so Iranians can use co-ops to coordinate with their communities by Distributing co-ops to supporters helping onboard new users teaching them about nfts wait uh Canadian podcast tried issuing co-ops their supporters and Co-op shut them down too and then when the Iranians complained the co-op team locked the Forum thread so I'm actually also in the wrong here around this time I was defending get coin consensus and co-ops uh this guy meti who's now a friend uh was saying that you know consensus you should practice what you preach and I was saying like maybe you guys should leave Iran or I don't know overthrow your government or something and uh the thing is is that we are all traumatized by Virgil's uh being convicted for violence conspiracy to violate International sanctions so I understand you know where they were coming from and where I was coming from but I think now we want to move forward and make sure that we are not being as over compliant uh I want to give a shout out to give F because they never wavered and they were always willing to support Iranians and uh raising funds through giveth I also want to give a shout out to Shayan eskandari who I met a few years ago when he was on the consensus diligence team auditing Malik version two he's been a big promoter of the Iranian cause and trying to fundraise for these things even a couple years ago when I was arguing against him uh so sanctions over compliance of fact recently issued the general license D2 update the intention is to increase support for Iranian freedom in Iran and it explicitly allows the export of free and free-based internet and software services to Iranians and so I am grateful for consensus readmitting Iranian students they did a lot of homework to figure out what they could and could not offer they can't do uh tutoring and grading but they have done a good job trying to make their coursework as accessible as possible um get coin also after talking with them they said they would work with our NGO for future fundraisers and let us handle the compliance which was also a positive development and we're happy to work with Co-op because I believe that co-ops also that should fall under internet services which is now exempt from sanctions uh but this goes beyond web three so this is a guy named morteza he was trying to do a fundraiser on GoFundMe to fund internet services uh in Iran like VPN access stuff like that and GoFundMe also shut down his crowdfunding campaign either they didn't want to deal with it or their Bank didn't want to deal with it and so that is why we have created Iran Unchained which is a new U.S based NGO raising funds to free Iran we're doing crypto first fundraising to avoid Bank over compliance it's using a Malik version 3 Dao and a series of gnosis safes for each Grant we have 15 members of the Iranian diaspora as founding members and we can send up to five hundred thousand dollars per year under the ofac general license e and most important thing is that we verify all the fund recipients we don't want to send money to the Islamic public and nobody wants us to but we have to provide the receipts so that we can provide quarterly reports to the U.S treasury and the things that we're looking at funding first are things like newspapers food vpns starlinks eth conference subsidies and Etc uh there were some technical difficulties that prevented us from getting our grants website fully online the graph was down uh and so uh you can use the website to create grants and fund grants and the first one that we are actually planning on funding is a newspaper in Iran a daily newspaper called zanzan Digi Azadi which is woman life Freedom uh it's becoming more popular and doing great work um so how ethereum and web3 can help more are better resources for managing social recovery uh like I talked about earlier uh ZK voting systems uh this is possibly one of the most adversarial environments you have uh you can't really use your real name for anything so ZK is not like a nice to have it's an absolute requirement other things like delegated democracy are cool uh the Iranians uh had a whole social media campaign where people delegated their vote so to speak to the Crown Prince they said I am delegating my vote to you and it's just like an Instagram post or a Twitter post but it would be pretty cool to do that in using an actual delegated uh democracy setup other things are ipfs swarmsia immutable documents app posting I know Iranians are already using this and some that plan to use this for being able to host their applications without needing centralized servers and another more ambitious uh way that ethereum could help is why don't we just put the government on some smart contracts uh so you know one day a dream of mine would be to make the like constitutional monarchy dot Soul you know contract maybe Cheyenne can help audit it and I'll throw in a rage quit somewhere so uh and finally uh we're gonna throw it Tehran and it's going to be the most lit ethereum conference ever thank you uh you can connect with us our Twitter is unchain Iran our DMS are open if you would like to contribute please get in touch our email is Iran Unchained at protonmail our website is iranonchain.

com look out for more grants coming up that you can help support and promote and yeah uh thank you all for your time this is actually a fun flag uh the current Islamic Republic flag says Allahu Akbar in this script here but this says uh zanzendiki Azadi so it's like a combination of the lion and Sun uh flag of the monarchy but also with the woman life freedom I found it I liked it so yeah thank you all for your time what