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Open Conversations: Removing Barriers to Ethereum Adoption (Gonzalo Othacehe)

Funding the CommonsMon, Feb 9, 2026, 12:00 AM

Ethereum is already useful—but it’s still hard for many people to use. In this conversation, Gonzalo Othacehe, Software Engineer at OpenZeppelin, talks about building from Argentina, where stablecoins and alternative financial systems are part of everyday reality. Ethereum works, but adoption often breaks at simple moments: when users try to transact and are blocked by gas fees or the need to hold native ETH. During the Funding the Commons Builder Residency, Gonzalo worked on a trustless, decentralized paymaster that lets users pay transaction fees with the tokens they already have. Liquidity providers supply ETH to sponsor transactions, allowing apps to abstract gas entirely. The goal is practical: reduce friction so Ethereum can be used by more people, not just experienced users. Filmed at Funding the Commons Builder Residency, Buenos Aires, November 2025. Relevant Projects OpenZeppelin: https://www.openzeppelin.com Funding the Commons: https://www.fundingthecommons.io Thank You to Our Sponsors Protocol Labs: https://www.protocol.ai human.tech by Holonym Foundation: https://human.tech/ Stellar Development Foundation: https://stellar.org Drips: https://drips.network Octant: https://octant.app NEAR Foundation: https://near.foundation Logos: https://logos.co

Transcript

I believe in Ethereum as a tool for human coordination. I think it provides a really well alternative system with all the others have failed people that has already been proven for example here in Argentina. [music] All the the freedom that people gains with using stable coins and these systems as an alternative is amazing. [music] I Gonzaleo I am from Argentina. I am an open source developer and full-time contributor at open [music] seen and here in the residency I have been building a solution for a problem that I feel is a strong barrier for the [music] adoption of Ethereum and for the usage of common users.

The idea is [music] that I think that they should be able to spend the tokens that they have [music] without having to understand how gas works or even having to hold native ETH in their [music] wallet. A problem that I have experienced a lot of times is when I want to on board friends into using Ethereum. [music] After I help them to set up a wallet and I send them some tokens, they want to spend or make use of that money they have their wallets claiming [music] that they doesn't have like enough uh native currency to pay for the network which uh I think is very frustrating [music] and even most of us as native like wry users experience like all the time. So I thought it would be much better [music] if we could just make use of the tokens that we already have on our wallet. For that me and [music] my team we are building a pay master which uh is completely trustless and decentralized.

It doesn't have any [music] third party controlling it and it allows anyone to provide the liquidity into it [music] to sponsor transactions in the network. The idea is that anyone can provide their ETH in order to sponsor other user transactions and they will be able to make a yield based [music] on that. So essentially users or apps can make use of these liquidity pools to pay for all [music] the transactions of the users has been amazing participating in the funding [music] the common residency. I have been feeling replenished by spending time with people that share the same values of Ethereum [music] and contributing to public goods. I think that the energy having been here has been amazing in that direction and everything is very aligned to [music] creating project that matters.

Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.