Bankless - Santiago Siri | Layer Zero

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Santiago Siri—or santi.eth on Twitter—is building Universal Basic Income on Ethereum through Proof of Humanity, the project he co-founded. As a community leader in the Ethereum space, Santi comes from Argentina, a country with a rich history of culture, inflation, corruption, resilience, and now… crypto. Recently touring Argentina with Vitalik, Santi reveals fascinating anecdotes from their travels and exemplifies how Argentina is ripe for a crypto revolution. An internet native country with a catastrophic economic past, Argentina is a perfect breeding ground for crypto innovation and adoption. Santi tells the story of Argentina from the second half of the 20th century to today’s landscape, and explains why he’s optimistic that a history of corruption and capital control can blossom into a brighter society with the growth of crypto. ------ 📣 ALTO IRA | THE CRYPTO RETIREMENT ACCOUNT https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA   ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/    ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon   ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across   🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask   💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger   🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix   🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants   ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 5:00 What Santi Cares About 9:43 Growing Up in Argentina 17:30 Inflation & Cascading Events 30:50 The Argentine Culture 39:50 The Crypto Bounce 53:00 Swinging into Collectivism 1:04:38 Vitalik 1:10:20 Argentine Crypto Utility 1:18:54 Proof of Humanity & UBI 1:34:08 Why Optimistic? 1:39:24 Closing ------ Resources: Santiago on Twitter https://twitter.com/santisiri?s=20   Proof of Humanity https://twitter.com/proofofhumanity?s=20   Democracy.Earth https://democracy.earth/   ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures  

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but is composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, we were talking to Santiago Siri, otherwise known as santi.e.eath on Twitter, and Santiago is a lot of been a community leader in the Argentina space for as long as I've been in crypto. While he doesn't currently live in Argentina, he still spends a ton of his mental energy and attention there. Santi was recently with Vitalik as Vitalik went around Argentina and experiencing what Argentina is like now that crypto has truly entered the Argentine space. And Argentina has always had this very

involved story with crypto. Argentina is a very internet connected nation with high inflation. and high capital controls and also a very strong developer community. And so it's kind of this perfect breeding ground for a crypto society. They actually need crypto for the reasons that crypto is useful in the first place. And it has just an internet fluent society that really allows that expression, that need of crypto to really manifest. And so Santee tells the story of more or less the fall of Argentina from a burgeoning metropolis in the late 80s and 90s down to just a very cutthroat society.

because of the role of inflation and the loss of savings by so many people in the country. Also, the introduction of just corruption from the government in capital controls. And now what is perhaps going to be the other side of that story as crypto enters the scene. And Santee tells a story of how it's not how we know America or maybe the rest of the world where you have society and then you have the crypto people. Santee tells a story of how Argentina is becoming a crypto-enabled society, all of them. And so it made me very, very interested in going down to Argentina myself and experiencing that for myself and just to see what a society looks like when everyone is on board with the whole crypto thing. And so I really enjoyed this conversation with Santi.

And I'm sure you are going to as well. So we'll get right into that conversation right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. The layer two era is upon us. Ethereum's layer two ecosystem is growing every day. And we need L2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer two life. A cross is the fastest and cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge. With A cross, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets back to the layer one. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously.

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Metamask Swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the Defi exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the Meta-Mask benefits of self-custy, lower gas costs, and increased transaction security. access rates. Medamask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about, which I used to collect PO apps, NFTs, and do all my defy things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded Metamask, you got to try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download Metamask for desktop and mobile at Metamask.io and load up your Treasurer, ledger, lattice, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3. Hey, Santi. How's it gone?

Hey, David. All good. How are you? Good. Fantastic. We've been around each other. periphery for a really long time now. And I think this is going to be the first time where we're going to have a very long in-depth conversation. So I'm excited to unpack a bunch of interesting stuff. Well, yeah, looking forward to it. Yeah, it's true. We've probably seen each other across many conferences around the world and we follow each other's steps on Twitter and social media. So it's good to finally get to know each other a little bit. Definitely. That's exactly what these layer zeros are for. I use them as a tool to get to know the people that I want to

better, but then also do that in public so other people can get to know you. So my first question for you is, Santi, what do you care about? Wow, that's a good, good icebreaker right there. You know, I come from Argentina, which is a developing country. Argentina has this tragic story of being 100 years ago, probably one of the wealthiest nations out there getting a lot of immigrants from Spain, from Italy, from all over the world, during the First World War and even during the Second World War. And something happened in the country, something broke,

something stopped working the way it did a hundred years ago. And now it's a suffering Latin American country, developing nations struggling from one economic crisis to the next one, with 50% of the people living under the poverty line, with a high inflation, with a broken economic system, and with very corrupt politicians. And my quest with technology throughout my career has always been trying to figure out what we can do

with digital technology, with information technology that can help improve people's lives. In Argentina and in Latin America, really, inequality is very visible, very rampant all over the place. And the one thing that I've seen change the world, change reality, changed the way I live it, changed the way my community lives in a positive way, has never been the politicians or, you know, the next leader or the next great charismatic

figure out there, and has always been technology. Like I've seen throughout my life, I'm almost 40 years old, I'm 38, and I've seen the rise of personal computing in the 80s and 90s. I've seen the emergence of the internet in the late 90s and 2000s. And now with the blockchain and Ethereum, it's like this thing that keeps on unfolding in front of our very eyes. And he has a tremendous promise to impact countries like mine that are desperately looking for an alternative. Because none of the existing systems, none of the existing monetary systems, the dollar, whatever it is, they don't work anymore over there. And I guess like my common denominator across the many projects that I have been involved with,

some projects without connection to politics, other projects without connection to crypto. In a prior life, I was into game development. One common denominator is use technology to help improve people's lives, to improve people's, you know, have an impact in people's pockets directly, like no strings attached. I think technology can be such a disrupt. force in a region like Latin America where, you know, we, we definitely are desperate for alternatives because nothing of the traditional circus work for us. So when I think about why I choose

the projects I choose or why I work on what I work on, mostly has to do with this memory of growing up in Latin America and, you know, trying to figure out how to improve society around me. You were born and raised in Argentina. That was where your childhood was? Yes, in Buenos Aires. I lived there almost 30 years. What was it like growing up there? Because as I've come to know Argentina, I've known it as back in the, I think the 70s and the 80s, it was just a burgeoning metropolis of just agriculture and just really good food and culture. What was it like growing up there before things broke? So I was born in 1983. And in 83 is when democracy got restarted in Argentina. We've been a democracy since then.

So I lived in democratic Argentina mostly. The chapter prior to that, the dictatorship we have from 76 to 83, has been a very brutal and a very violent event in the country, with 30,000 people being disappeared by the government, brutal, I don't know, we could call it a civil war between right, you know, fascists and left-wing guerrillas that were making terrorist attempts and killing each other. So I appeared in the country right when the country finally after the Falklands War, the Falklands Malvinas were, I should say, right after the country got back its democracy. And even though we became a democratic country, Argentina, I would say, it's still, a very democratic country where when you go through the options that you have to vote,

you will find options on the extreme left, on the extreme right, and a lot of in the middle. And those options, they all get votes. It's not like there's a lack of representation in ideological terms. But from an economic standpoint, in the 80s, we had hyperinflation. In 1989, 1989, I was six, seven years old back then, but prices, changed every day. The inflation rate was 5,000% a year. This means that, you know, the prices that you have for products on a given day, the next day, supermarkets, companies, everyone had to price everything again. And it was, that led to a huge crisis, big economic crisis that led to

the first president, Alfoncine, to not finish his presidency. And eventually, in the 1990s, another guy came along called Carlos Menem, who ruled Argentina for 10 years. And Carlos Menom kind of figured out how to fight inflation. He semi-dollarized the economy. He made a law that one Argentine peso should equal one U.S. dollar and develop a strong connection to the U.S. This is after the Berlin Wall fell. So probably the world became more Americanized after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So most of my childhood and teenage years were during that epoch.

And in that period, the problem was not inflation. anymore, but it was unemployment because buying US dollars suddenly was very cheap in Argentina. That meant that imports were very cheap rather than producing stuff in the country. So a lot of factories, a lot of companies had to close doors because it was simply cheaper to import goods from abroad. And that's like the tragedy of Argentina. You know, you go from dealing with huge inflation and then you all dealing with huge unemployment and it doesn't seem like we're able to find like a middle ground in the way we do things.

And that has led to, I think in Argentina, in the context of Latin America, has always been very good at generating very skilled entrepreneurs, very resilient entrepreneurs. I remember the dot-com years. I was already a teenager when I had internet access for the first time, broadband access later on. In the late 90s, Argentina was able to produce some of the largest, e-commerce companies, if not the largest e-commerce company in Latin America, that has been a common denominator of Argentine entrepreneurs being able to capture the Latin American market, basically because Brazil speaks another language and it has a huge domestic market, so they don't care what happens

outside Brazil, and Mexico has a lot of the talent actually going to the U.S., because it's right there. So Argentina always strategically had a very strong position of generating good entrepreneurs and building technology that historically has been a leader in the region, a leader in Latin America. And I think our history of knowing that we're dealing with a very broken economic system, that we will deal with inflation, we will deal with, you know, we will deal with a lot of kinds of bizarre crises that you cannot even imagine. but it's a country that is constantly under, you know, whenever I talk to my mom today, I ask her, how is Argentina doing? And she tells me, worse than ever before.

And that's always her answer for the last seven years since I left the country. And it's always like getting worse and worse. But at the end of the day, that has led to the Argentine people to be very resilient, very resourceful, very entrepreneurial, very capable of thinking outside the box. and I was lucky enough that I grew up with a family that gave me a good education. I was able to travel around the world to visit Europe or visit the U.S. when I was a child, and that certainly helped open up my mind in a great way and that had a lasting impact in my life. That's why I'm probably talking to you here in English or I develop a career more internationally.

But when I look back at the country, its people are amazing. like it's an incredible bunch of creative lateral thinkers that can come up with incredible solutions. You know, fast forward to today, I see it in the crypto community in Argentina. A lot of the innovation being built around Ethereum, being built around Bitcoin. A lot of the minds that are emerging from Argentina, engineers, developers, hackers, entrepreneurs, are simply brilliant by any international measure. And this is literally the children of hyperinflation, the children of the convertibility that led to huge unemployment in the 90s. I wish we could find a formula for our country.

We always tell ourselves that we're a country of individuals, who are very good at the individual level, but probably not so good at the community or team level. And collectively, we don't seem to work efficiently. We cannot even manage our own country. but individually, you know, we produce probably the best soccer players in the world or we produce great entrepreneurs that whenever they have to go abroad, they become very successful. But internally in the country, it's like a messed up place. And, you know, it's always a challenge. But it's the place I was born and the place I love.

And, you know, there's a lot of fantastic things about our culture, you know, how we treasure friendship or how we connect with other people, that it's something really special. I want to definitely have this individual versus collective theme as one of the crux of this conversation. But in order to get there, I want to keep on unpacking some of just the originating influences of Argentina. The thing I want to learn the most right now is what was the order of operations for this change in Argentina? I think inflation is at the very beginning of the story. But what caused inflation? Like what was the original thing that started this cascading set of events?

Well, it's, inflation has always been a constant. I, you know, it depends on who you ask. You will get different answers to this question for sure. You know, there will be the monetarists that will tell you, you know, they are printing and printing and printing money. And that's probably maybe the case. I'm pretty sure that, you know, in the 80s when we had hyperinflation, the only solution that the government could come up with was,

let's just print more money and that led to a disaster. Then there could be, you know, there are other factors. in place as well. Argentina is a country very much dependent on commodity prices. Our biggest export is soy and soy prices go up. They go down. When there are

good years, Argentina has a lot of reserves. When there are bad years, the country is about to explode in a crisis. So, and, you know, there's a lot of people, you know, simply playing the media, playing politics behind people's, you know,

interests. It's a bit of a tragic consequence. We're still dealing with that today. Over the last 20 years, Argentina, again, when the convertibility or the ability to convert U.S. dollars to pesos one to one, when that economic project ended, we went back to an inflationary model, and the currency has systematically lost its value 200 times. So in the 90s, it was one peso, one dollar. When that ended, in 2001, we had a huge crisis, and now we're back to 200 pesos one dollar. Suddenly, our currency lost 200 times its value in the last 20 years. You know, the economic factors, the external factors probably has to do with commodity prices

and macro variables like that. And from the internal standpoint, because the country has such, has a lot of, I would say, like humanitarian problems. Like if you walk through the streets of Buenos Aires, and actually we did this with Vitalik, there are some huge slams in the middle of the most wealthy neighborhoods in the city. So you have this huge inequality in the country. With Vitalique, we actually visited one of these slams so he could get a close view of how a lot of people live in a country like Argentina

and not just the tourist version of the country. And you see this inequality all over the place. There's more than 5,000 slams where people do not have access to basic goods, to basic water, to basic needs. They might have the youth smartphones and an internet, connection, so the people are connected, but infrastructure is simply not there. And sadly, many populist politicians, their only solution or the only remedy to address a situation like that is, let's just put money in their pockets, regardless of taking any consideration of how that money

is created, they just print it. And that populist formula, you know, works for a little while, and ending in the long run generates this situation of the country losing value significantly. And, you know, it's simply a very tragic consequence because it perpetuates

the position people are living in, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of investment. It perpetuates the inequality. And it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. So because the inequality keeps growing, politicians keep printing, and the more they print,

the more the status quo remains, it's the same. And there's simple, It seems to me that at least from the generations above me, you know, that they govern the country in the past, they are simply not able to think outside the box. The discussion in Argentina has always been, shall we agree with the IMF and get some US dollars to strengthen our currency but get a huge debt and the debt keeps growing with the IMF? Or we give our back to the IMF and sadly we become a pro-Venezuela, pro-Cube, a country disconnected from the financial world, you know, we try to do the revolution, quote, unquote. None of these approaches are really, you know, addressing people's problems, addressing

the situation from a structural or from a systemic point of view. It's just opportunist, populist, politicians taking advantage and misusing public resources, you know, regardless of the ideological sign of who is in charge. You know, I think that today, today, we have, there's a generational change, at least the crypto generation or the online generation. Let's not call them millennials. You know, we have the online generation, the offline generation. The online generation is growing up, you know, and I'm probably one of the oldest members of that generation, but there's a lot of kids from, you know, between 20 and 30 years old that

are now suddenly thinking in a much different way about money, about value, about, you know, connected to the world, looking, you know, realizing that Argentina is not a special case in the planet, that, you know, we can certainly think globally and connect with the world at large. And there's a new generation that I hope starts thinking about these issues in a different way. I see it in the development front. The developer community, the hackers, the software developers are certainly innovating in a way that has no precedent in the country. For the first time, there are projects being born in Argentina. They are global.

They are not looking at Latin America as a market, but are actually thinking in global terms. There's a generation of engineers that have created some of the most successful companies built around Ethereum, thinking about, you know, crypto and technology as a way of addressing some of the challenges that society is facing. And, you know, I recently visited Argentina just a few weeks ago for Vitalik's trip there. and I haven't been there since before the pandemic. And it was kind of like suddenly getting into a back to the future car and actually traveling to the year 2034 because it really felt very futuristic.

Everyone under 30 years old recognized Vitalik in the streets. They knew who he was. They knew about Ethereum. They asked him about Ethereum 2.0 or when is the merge going to happen, like random people in the streets. most of them obviously probably under 30 years old but it's like in the pandemic a lot of people suddenly accelerated their learning skills

about crypto or got into crypto in Argentina we have high inflation capital controls it's illegal to buy US dollars even though there's a black market of it and we have subsidized energy so everyone and their mothers are mining crypto they're having miners at home. It's almost insane.

You see in the restaurant where we were with Vitalik, the waiter came to ask him for a picture. Taxi driver asking things about crypto. Suddenly, Vitalik discovered that he has big Jagger status in Argentina. And I think that the pandemic accelerated people learning about this technology. The bull market also benefited a lot of people. And suddenly there's, like, I perceive for the first time, a new generation in Argentina

that it's really connected to this stuff in a way that is way more significant than what I see here in Spain, where I live. In Spain, it's the Euro comfort zone. The welfare state works fantastic. People live a very secure life.

Everyone is in a comfort level that they are not, not anyone is, no one is taking any risks in Europe in Spain. There's very few entrepreneurs, very few crypto mines, whereas in Argentina, it's like everywhere. You see it in the billboards in the streets.

There's the most important streets filled with advertisement about crypto startups and crypto companies. I feel like the country's like making a leapfrog after the pandemic in adoption, not only at the developer level, which is what I knew, but what caught me by surprise is that at the user level,

we were seeing this kind of popular adoption of Ethereum and Bitcoin and all of these new tech. to me that speaks greatly about what crypto is achieving because from a geopolitical standpoint, Argentina is at the end of the world. It's a forgotten country, third world nation, struggling through financial crisis to financial crisis. And in the last seven years,

I've been pretty much in over 30 countries following the Ethereum crowd, following this revolution around the world, and the fact that Argentina is suddenly growing in adoption so aggressively, speaks greatly of crypto, speaks greatly of this technology because it means that the technology is impacting the most

where it's really needed the most. In Argentina, it's not a theoretical quirk to learn about crypto or an investment opportunity. It's for a lot of people a necessity. They need it. They can't buy dollars. They are filled with pesos that are worthless. They need this thing.

To me, that gives me a lot of help about the future of the country. The past of the country is a disaster, like I told you. But it's still a great country with great people. And I think that this new generation or what crypto is doing there is a very fertile ground for this technology. And some years ago, it was still a thing of us, the nerds, you know. But today, you know, it's on mainstream media. When Vitalik was there, you turn on the TV in Argentina.

Every news show was talking about this guy. That was a revelation. Probably to Vitalik, discovering that he'll probably be facing. this more and more in the future anywhere he goes. So dealing with his celebrity status will be a challenge for him, but I think he will do fantastic because he's simply an amazing human

being. He's a monk that travels around the world with his backpack picking the world, you know, preaching the truth. But for Argentina, I was like a big epiphany for society. Like suddenly everyone was like, hey, you're into crypto? I'm into crypto also. Like everyone. I'm a

public figure there in crypto scene and whatnot. And I realized that. Like the amount of messages and DMs and emails and phone calls that I got since that trip is beyond my traditional level of information diet. It gives me the signal that there's something very serious brewing up there. And it's coming from the youth, bottom up. It's not like the El Salvador case where El Salvador got lucky enough to have a millennial president. And this guy, sadly, he's kind of a maximalist, but he's pushing Bitcoin through everything. everyone's throats top down.

In Argentina, it's bottom-up adoption. And with Vitalik, we have been able to meet with an ex-president, with a potential future president, with the government, with a left-wing activist. It met with a whole spectrum of leaders that the country has. Everyone left aside their differences. That's the power that Vitalik had.

I don't think many people in the world can unite Argentines, like Vitalik did. And it's because everyone is realizing that there's this thing happening with the new generations that is very wild, very wild. That gives me hope, you know. The last little bit of context I want to unpack before getting even more into the crypto conversation is the background around the government and the people's trust or lack of trust in the government.

My general understanding of the Argentine government was that at one point in time, it was democracy with its feet under itself, making progress, and then correct. kind of took over, perhaps around the same time that inflation did. My general gut take was that people were optimistic about the future of Argentine leadership, but when the going got tough, it got really hard for people to think in the long term. And so the incentive for corruption started to outweigh the incentive to actually build stuff. Can you kind of just like walk us through the progression of people's trust in the government and the progression of corruption in Argentina?

Yeah, I can tell you what I witnessed, you know, there. Inflation is a terrible thing, like really terrible, because it's like the fable of the boiling frog, like you don't realize how terrible it is until it's too late. The thing about inflation, like in Argentina, everyone now is used to 50% of annual inflation. Compare that to America's 6% recently reported. We were in the 6% level probably 15 years ago, and suddenly all-help broke loose. And that leads to situations like if you're a business owner,

you will have to renegotiate salaries every three months or every six months. And it's a very uncomfortable, unpleasant conversation to renegotiate salaries with the people who are working for you and who are like building this thing with you. Every three or six months, you have to renegotiate salaries all over again,

having this unpleasant conversation, this friction between, you know, the management, and the workers, and this generates a very aggressive culture, a culture where people don't treat each other nicely. Argentines are known to be very, very aggressive. I have many theories about that, but inflation certainly permeates our culture.

Another reason might be that we eat a lot of meat. I once tweeted this on Twitter, and I received a thousand replies of people like trash-talking me and insulting me, kind of proving my point of how we are with. with a level of aggression. I realize this more and more, the more I live abroad. The red meat turns into testosterone.

Yeah. Like just compare us with India. Like India, no one eats meat. And there is it more chill than us. In Argentina, you will eat meat for breakfast. You will eat meat for lunch.

You will eat at dinner. It's a carnivore country. Maybe even a bit cannibal, I would say. We eat our own. So it's an inflation definitely, like generates an aggressive culture. And the distrust, when we had the convertibility in the 90s, which was one peso, one dollar, and it was a law and no one could print any pesos without packing that up with US dollars, that worked very well for a few years.

It had the rising issue of unemployment. There was a lot of corruption during those years. And when the tithe changed globally, either commodity prices went down or we started, you know, at the end of the day, the policy of the US dollar is much. mandated by a single country, the United States. So whenever the United States changes its policy, suddenly Argentina has no maneuver over that. There were some crisis, you know, mild financial crisis happening in the late 90s, and that led to, you know, countries like Argentina suddenly, you know,

losing economic capacity, losing, you know, the ability to produce, the ability to do a lot of things. And that led to a situation where our reserves almost dried out. the IMF was not going to lend us any money. The Twin Towers attack 9-11 happened, so that definitely shut the doors of the IMF. There was simply no consideration for what's going on Argentina when 9-11 happened. And right after 9-11 happened, we started receiving funds from the US. The banks suddenly closed the, you know, you were only able to retire from the bank,

$250 per week. that was the cap of how much money you were able to retire from the bank. When that got announced, a bank grant happened. People took the streets, they took their kitchen instruments, and they started going to the banks and asking for their savings back. And of course, the savings never came back. Government changed. We had five presidents in one week, and a guy came that said,

now it's going to be four pesos, one dollar. The currency got devaluated. you know, Forex in one day. People lost their savings, their life savings in a dramatic way. And that has led to everyone simply distrusting banks. Never keep your money in the bank. In Argentina, for example, if you want to buy a home, you want to buy an apartment or you want to buy a car, you don't do a bank transfer.

You don't do a wire transfer. No one has their money in the bank. You go with a backpack or something that might not be too flashy. And you just keep the stash of US dollars. You go to a private meeting. Someone will count the US dollars. You know, everyone will count them once you make sure the money is right. The people is a cash transaction.

Buying an apartment in Argentina is unbelievably a cash transaction. More recently, there have been crypto transactions. But until very recently, 100% of the apartments in Argentina were bought with cash. That's how much we distrust. Because that's the only way you can trust. That's the only way. No one wants their money in the bank. After what happened in 2001, no one wants to keep their money in the bank.

This is another consequence, very tragic consequence. A lot of people keep their money at home. Like they literally keep the piles of cash under the mattress or hidden somewhere at home. And that leads to a lot of robbers and thieves suddenly trying to enter your home and, you know, kidnap you and try to steal your money. Because everything is a honeypot. Yeah, it's a honeypot. And there were a lot of kidnapping events during a moment where, you know, it was very common.

It was called Express Kidnapping, Sequester Express. Like, you didn't even have branding. Like, oh, you turned on the TV and you saw another episode of Express kidnapping happen here, and they tied the person and they stole their money because people kept their money at home. They don't want it in the banks. And that leads to a lot of violence, to a lot of violence, like very violent situations. very violent country. It's incredible what a lack of good governance can do to a country.

Argentina checks every mark of everything done the wrong way, and it's really a very sad thing. That's why today the country is suffering. A lot of people are living. People like me left the country. People that are young, they're starting their families, or they want to, you know, the world has become much smaller. in the past decades.

It's much easier to live abroad today than ever before. And a lot of people that, you know, want to pursue a career that came out of the university, that want to become an entrepreneur, they just are going to try to do it abroad. And the country is losing a lot of bright minds. It's like the ripple effect has been tremendous in the country.

That's why I don't know how much worse it can get. That's my hopeful note there. Like it can't get any way. worse than this, you know, there has to be a floor at a certain point and a bounce eventually happening. I think crypto might help us bounce. How high can we bounce? Well, we'll see. We'll find out in the next couple of decades. I still remain optimistic about what can be that. I think this story is just a great example of what happens when social systems break down. Bankless listeners will know what line I always say next, where one of my favorite lines out of the

cypherpunk manifesto is that cypherpunks understand that. that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And code includes things like governments, like democracies, like our constitution, like the protocol for coordination across a country. And I think many, many bitcoiners always say that like money is at the basement of everything, right? Like if you fix money, you fix everything. Also, if you break money, you break everything. And so these social systems exist on top of the money that we use. What I'm seeing is that the Argentine money broke it down for a handful of reasons, both external, and internally as a result of that, how far people could extend trust to their neighbors

and communities had to contract significantly. It went from a whole entire country down to, like, you know, your family, your local family and your friends, because that's the only people that you can trust. And you're telling me that, like, they can't use banks. They can't use the banking network that a social system because the code is broken, right? The government procedures are broken. And so no one can trust that. And so now culture around Argentina has devolved into just,

people being able to trust a smaller and smaller sphere of people around them. And I think perhaps why this lends the Argentine people so well into crypto is because crypto you're not supposed to trust anyone. Like you don't have to trust anyone. And when the volatility of a nation becomes so high with the volatility of money, the value of money is volatile, but also the volatility of imports and exports and just the production and industry, everything is volatile, individuals learn how to weather that volatility in their own particular way.

Maybe that's why like Argentina is such an individualist culture is because the collective has broken down and kind of turned into like more or less every person for themselves. But that has really primed Argentine culture to take advantage of crypto, which crypto really enshrines the sovereignty of the individual and the empowerment of the individual. And so like when you're telling me like in in order to buy an apartment, you need to show up with a backpack full of cash, well, there's nothing better as a replacement than that than private keys, right? You can bring private keys in your brain. All of a sudden, that trust is now a new social system, and the Argentine people are in need of it the most. When you say that you think that there is like a bounce coming for Argentina, like Argentina is about to hit off of a floor,

and we're also seeing the rise of crypto post-COVID. I'm seeing that those things are directly related. The people in Argentina can individually be successful, but they're just looking for systems to allow that individual success to lend itself into collective success. How do you feel about this interpretation? To me, it's a very surprising fact that the Argentina that I recently discovered when I went back, because I left the country seven years ago. I tried to do things in Argentina that really showed me how broken the country was. I started a political party there that we had the idea 10 years ago. It's a long time ago already, but we had the idea of having candidates in Congress that would vote every law

according to people's vote online. So we had to figure out how to do online democracy. and at the same time to do a political party. A long story short, when I got into politics there, it got so nasty, so broken, so absurd, and like people fighting for nothing that when I left the country, for three years, I never came back. I was, like, mad or, like, pissed off.

You know, I had enough of this country already. I just want something else. I went to, you know, I got accepted into a white combinator in 2015, and started Democracy at Foundation, and figured, you know, let's think it's probably easier to fix the world than to fix Argentina. Fast forward to today, it turns out that in the last decade, you know, the emergence of Bitcoin, the emergence of Ethereum,

you know, surprisingly, and not so surprisingly, like it's like a Black Swan event that kind of makes sense when you look back. Argentina is an incredible fertile ground for this kind of technology. And for many years, this was a theory. But now recently it's like it's actually happening. Probably there's not a single politician right now in Congress or, you know, it understands what's going on with crypto. But the people, their families, the community, the entrepreneurs, the developers, the users,

it's growing dramatically. And I compare it, you know, I lived in the U.S. for five years. I live in, it's going to be three years now. I've been in Spain. Don't get me wrong. America has given me some of the most extraordinary operations. opportunities in my career. In Spain, you know, it's a very comfortable life in Europe. It's a very secure place, very stable. Argentina is wild as fuck. He has always been like that. It's like,

what's going to happen now? We all joke about it also. The one thing that I think has made us very special also in this whole context is our sense of humor. We have a very strong, powerful, crazy, a little bit insane sense of humor that kind of helps us go through our day. And with crypto, I remember, I've been involved with the tech scene in Buenos Aires for many, you know, since I was 15 years old, probably for more than 20 years.

And I remember in the Doctom years, you know, we had a lot of investment going on, a lot of companies being created. Some of these companies were acquired by American companies and some successful acquisitions, but none of these companies had customers. They all had inflated valuations,

crazy valuations, until the bubble bursted and then everything watered down and none of these companies had any real customers. Today, 2022, I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires. I see the advertisements of many crypto companies started in

Argentina. Some of the international ones are also there. I visited some of these companies and met their entrepreneurs and And they showed me their numbers. And they are selling credit cards that do cashback with crypto. They are doubling in sales every three weeks. They are, yeah, the rate of, you know, the level of customers and adoption is enormous.

Everyone is interested and excited about the next thing happening on crypto. And it's obviously, especially the youth, that everyone uses e-commerce today. Everyone uses, you know, they do their groceries, they do everything. It's done online now, especially after the, after COVID, this became much more commonplace in Latin America. E-commerce grew significantly. Everyone uses fintech, but the fintech that uses crypto is destroying the market. It's beating the competition, beating the hell out of the competition. Some of these new companies that are doing cashback with ether or cashback with Bitcoin or connecting their bank accounts to ETH.

or to Lightning Network, like it's really happening, and the numbers are huge. The real customers, real money flowing in. Like, it's really happened. And some of these companies have raised tens of millions of dollars. Like emerging markets have become a top thing for the Bay Area. So emerging markets combined with crypto is an incredible combination. And Argentina is living in that regard, much to my surprise. You know, I left the country looking for opportunity abroad.

that I've been living abroad for almost a decade, the thing that I find most interesting going on out there is in my own country, where this move is happening. It's really impressive what's going on there. So that's why I'm like, okay, there's

a silver lining in all of this. Maybe the country had to go through shit in order to be the most apt country for, you know, leading in terms of crypto adoption out there. I'm very proud of the community of developers and smart contract engineers

that emerged out of Argentina. Some of my colleagues and friends were involved in many of the most relevant projects happening in Ethereum. And to me, it's mind-blowing that these projects came out of guys like me from Argentina. I can mention you, Open Sepelin, DeCentraland, MakerDAO, and the list is really long.

So I shouldn't keep on mentioning names because I have to keep going and going. But it's a long list. It's like this generation of engineers and hackers that is kind of like, I think, consciously or unconsciously embracing crypto because maybe this can help out our families. Maybe this can help out our community. And the results so far have been very, very good. The project I'm involved with, that is proof of humanity and what we have been doing with UVI, the stories I got in the last year since we launched the project are increasingly. incredible. Like, a lot of people, we have definitely our biggest base of users is in Argentina and in Latin America.

We have a very large community. And you just hear stories of people that for the first time they installed Metamask. They went through the whole Web3 initiation process. And, you know, I've seen this firsthand. A lot of people installed Metamask and started using Ethereum and Web3 to get into proof of humanity and start, you know, getting some UBI and trading on ERC20 for the first thing. time and a lot of these people came from my social circles, you know, when we were launching the project, and I realized that a lot of them were people that do not come from the nerdy, techy, geeky scene of Buenos Aires. These were, you know, family members or friends of my friends or like people that come from much, much more diverse backgrounds, but they are into this thing. To me, was like suddenly realizing, wow, Ethereum is like kind of growing into the next phase.

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crypto allows just the maximum expression of the individual. Because crypto is a very individual technology. What happens to the culture of Argentines as crypto becomes more and more adopted? What do you think is going to happen? Argentina has always been very individualistic. You know, if I had to say, you know, what kind of country we are, it's a country of individuals, for sure. Even though, you know, in the greater context of Latin America, growing up in Latin America, you will see, you will find in society a lot of people, a lot of society, maybe even half of society, supporting more collectivist ideologies.

Like the Cuban Revolution, you will find half of the people in Argentina probably defending the Cuban Revolution or defending Chavez in Venezuela, and the other half completely against it. So it's not like, even though we're a country of individuals or very good at the individual level, ideologically speaking as a country that has grown in Latin America and in Latin America under the shadow of the United States I guess some of that reaction against the United States gets channeled through more socialist or communist philosophies

that you will find in the intellectuals or in the journalists or in the thinkers of the country. So it's not like Argentina is not turning into Singapore anytime soon. It's still a country that has its own struggles, has its own challenges. But I think crypto has the potential to, first and foremost, empower a new generation and give that new generation a new way about thinking about reality. Because usually the youth, when you look at the lens of politics, the youth has been copted by the youth of other decades.

The people who rule the country now were young in the 70s. In the 70s, the youth was about doing the revolution, taking by force the power and installing, like, the Cuban revolution, some kind of communist nightmare. They lost that battle in the 70s, but a lot of these people are ruling the country today, like the president and the government, they have a very heavy influence on their youth in the 70s. We'll call them setentistas, you know, the people that, and they try to tell the youth of today that they should be like the youth of that time. And that's so fucked up in many ways. The youth of today, the youth of today is the crypto youth. That's the thing that I find so exciting. When I talked to, when we did a Vitalik conference in Buenos Aires, Vitalik arrived on Saturday.

On Saturday, he met President Macri, an ex-President. of the country, you know, half of the country probably loves him, half of the country probably hates him. But he's an ex-president, so it was a good way of sending a signal to the country that, hey, this guy, Vitalik, who might as well be the Einstein of the 21st century, is in our country. And that was a great thing that he, you know, we were able to give this signal to the country, so the country learns about Ethereum. And so an Ethereum can discover how passionate Argentina is about this technology. When Vitalik realizes that, you know, he might be having somewhat of a MiGi Jagger status in Argentina,

he tells me, I'd like to do a conference, so this is not like an exclusive trip just for me, because I'm realizing, you know, how much people are talking about my visit here. So let's do a conference. I talk with the government of Buenos Aires. We found a beautiful place for a thousand people, and we make the flyer. We announced the conference. And in three minutes, three minutes, the conference. conference sold out.

Whoa. Completely sold out. A thousand people. A thousand people. Two years, you know, we announced this on a Sunday. On Tuesday, we did the conference. The major of the city came. He had a private meeting with Vitalik.

This is a guy that maybe could be the next president of the country. All of the thousand people that bought their ticket that got their ticket, they were there. Packed room. Everyone wanted to be there. People complaining on Twitter that they couldn't get tickets. And Vitalik gave one of his fantastic keynotes. We did an interview on stage to him.

He's such an easy person to interview because you ask him one thing and he will always give you at least three paragraphs describing his line of thought. And the people there, these 1,000 young people that came to see him live, they were all probably between 1718 to 28, 29. Like very, very young. And they were fascinated by what's going on. Like, I remember going outside to say hi to some friends. And suddenly I find myself giving a sub-conference inside the conference. Like a crowd builds around me, and people start asking me questions. And everyone was so thankful, was so happy, was so in this belief that Vitalik came to Argentina.

They couldn't believe it. You know, people were so appreciative of that. when we went to the slam, we went to a school that was actually founded by Pope Francis. And in the schools, some students came. And again, this is 16, 17 years old. And one student came with questions written, had written in a paper. And the questions were about Vitalik's career. He asked him, well, when did you start, how did you start writing for Bitcoin magazine?

And this guy that grew up in a slam, that grew up in a disenfranchised section of the definitely with much less possibilities than, you know, 90% of the people living in Buenos Aires, he knew everything about Vitalik. He knew, you know, he was into Ethereum. He was already learning to mine cryptocurrency. And that, to me, speaks so greatly about the inclusive capacities of crypto and the youth is like gets it like this. You know, I feel this fractal sensation in my mind.

own, you know, whenever I go to that con or whenever I go to an ETH event, I know I'm being respected for being the old guy around. I'm 38. It's the 20-year-olds that are explaining me roll-ups or are explaining me, you know, whatever is the next thing. You know, it's always the youth that teach you about what's up and coming with technology. And it's so important to pay attention to the youth. And in Argentina, thankfully, I think that the crypto virus is very, very strong right now. And a lot of these kids will grow up, they will start up things, they will create stuff that will surprise us.

So I think that this legitimate youth and not the youth from the 70s is what needs to happen for the country to change. Will it that lead to a more individualistic society or a more market-loving, free-market-loving society? maybe it's a bit of an antidote to a lot of the socialist leanings that you will also find in Argentina, but which is

also a consequence of the rampant inequality. The inequality is in your face there. If you walk in Buenos Aires, you will find an entire family going through the dustbin or through the trash and it's such a sad image

and it's an image that is everywhere. So I guess it's not that we're left wing or right wing we're a bit of dreaming of an utopia or some kind of powerful idea that can really change things for us. And my sensation is that if that idea exists somewhere, it's definitely in the realm of information technology and digital stuff. Like it's not in the realm of legacy, ideological, you know, economic schools, but really, you know, the hackers, is the Cypherpank manifesto, is the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. That's the literature.

It's the sovereign individual. It's the infinite machine. That's the literature that I think is really bringing new ideas. And it's in information technology. It's with bits that the only thing that I've seen throughout my entire life that has really impacted people's lives for the better. and I think that the youth gets this. I have no choice but to be an optimist also.

As an entrepreneur, you have to be an optimist. But what I've seen in Buenos Aires recently caught me by surprise in a significant way. And it made me feel very proud. It was the proudest moment of my career. To have my hero, Vitalik Buterick, our hero, Vitalik Buterin visiting my country for the first time, for him to realize that my country laughs him. And for my country to realize that this,

is for real and it's so powerful that the entire political spectrum has to meet with him. It's like I have never felt any, I don't know if I will ever be able to surpass an experience like that, but it speaks greatly about what's going on there and the potential it has to change things. I think perhaps one of the best reasons to be happy about that is that because Battalick is very morally grounded. He's a realist, but he's also an optimist at the same time. and he definitely sees the potential of technology for good.

But he will never go out and, like, say something ridiculous or crazy just to, like, drum up a crowd. He's always very pragmatic and effective. And the fact that, like, so much of Argentina is seeing Vitalic pragmatism and then falling in line behind that, rather than some sort of populist leader that's drumming up a crowd or, you know, some sort of, like, Trumpian figure who knows how to, like, you know, play the media. Vitalik's the opposite of that. And people are falling behind him as well. That gets me really, really optimistic.

Because we need that in today's world. There's a lot of ways to drum up society to get them to do the things that you want. And Vitalik's not doing that at all. And people still, like, resonate with his message and, you know, fall in line behind his leadership. That's why he's like a monk. Yeah. In Argentina, I caught the attention that he always went everywhere with wearing sandals and socks. He went to meet the president like that.

He went to meet the minister of economy like that. And that's the most cyphor punk thing I can think of. He's so grounded. He's so, you know, if money shows the real face of who you are, the real face of Italic is amazing. Because he had all kinds of offers in Argentina. You can imagine that when people found out he was there, I got invitations for him to go on a private jet to the Patagonia

or to go to Punta de Les. stay in a helicopter to meet, you know, this powerful guy or to go, you know, he got all kinds of fancy invitations. And he got, you know, the opportunity to visit a slum and to meet, you know, how the working class in Argentina really lives. And he chose to go to the slam. He chose to go to the school there, to talk to the people there. The people were, you know, obviously fascinated by this guy that looks completely different than anyone else in Argentina. like Metallica as a Russian. He obviously caught some people's attention,

but you saw just little kids approaching him and asking, where do you come from and what do you do? And him very politely in Spanish, actually. We were all surprised that he actually speaks very good Spanish, explaining who he was and what he does, asking questions about how people live there, how families live there, thinking about learning about these social challenges,

are the social dramas that people are facing, and he wanted to see that. He didn't want none of the fancy programs. I remember every day I sent Vitalik a couple of options. You have this, this and that. What do you want to do? He chose where he heart really is, and I think he actually said something

in the first meeting we had with President Macri. He said that one of the problems with technology is that it's probably easier to generate innovation in the information spectrum than in the physical world because it's easier to iterate and change things with digital bits and information than to iterate and change things in the physical world. So a lot of investment and a lot of innovation

is software only, and it's software to make better software. He said that this leads to a situation where you create a society where you have this incredible billionaires creating a lot of wealth, But at the same time, you have a lot of junkies, you know, and homeless people who are, you know, doing her, shooting heroin in the streets. And, you know, the wealth side is completely blinded by what's happening on this social side, where, you know, a lot of people are getting left behind and living, you know, through a tragedy in the very same city where this happens. And he used San Francisco as an example. I lived in San Francisco and, you know, I saw that.

You know, you walk through the tenderloin, you will see it. For him, he said, you know, it's very important to support projects that are being built on Ethereum that make sure that they impact in reality, that have an impact in the real world. I guess that's why he's kind of been talking more about, you know, let's, Dify is fun, defy is great, but there's, let's try to think about, you know, the social Ethereum, how Ethereum can help society at large. And I guess that's why he got interested into proof of humanity and UVI. I think that this is a very positive aspect of his leadership,

that he cares and he's paying attention to stuff like this, to the social aspect. It's a wonderful thing. Very uncommon. He's the most, the strangest billionaire I have ever met for sure. I want to go into that a little bit more. Of all of the startups that you've talked about in Argentina, the crypto startups that you are saying have completely beat out all the fintech startups that haven't been using crypto.

What are the use cases that are really the most successful in Argentina? Is it payments? What are the successful crypto startups in Argentina? What are the utility and uses that people really, really need? So the fintech sector in general has been pushing a strategy of bank inclusion through generating a lot of debit cards and credit cards. and digital banks have become a phenomenon of the last couple of years. Among these digital banks, there's one of these banks.

I will not say, you know, I can say the name. It's called Lemon, which really have a huge impression. The guys of Lemon are, they are doing, you know, a fintech company that works as an exchange, but they are issuing credit cards where you will get cashback with crypto. You will get your cashback benefits with Ether or with BTC or, you know, with any U.S.C.20 token that's out there. They actually support a lot of tokens. Because of this, they are beating the entire competition.

The whole sector is growing. Fintech is definitely growing significantly, and there's a couple of unicorn companies already playing in the industry there. The consumer, you know, the people that want their credit card to buy their groceries, to, you know, make their things online to do e-commerce,

are those that actually are crypto-native companies. that have this, this might be a small feature, but if you can accumulate a little bit of crypto every day, that's a much more decidable than accumulating a little bit of Argentine pesos every day. It's a huge difference. So it's the startups that enable savings that really get adopted quickly in Argentina? Yeah, they enable savings. And because of that, they open the gates for people to start experimenting with DFI products,

with NFTs, with Dau's have been growing a lot. there's a lot of interesting communities. You know, I've seen the growth in the demand for developers, the demand for people that know solidity, companies like Open Sepelin, Decentraland, Cletus, you know, have created a school of training developers. So now we have a lot of people learning how to build smart contracts, how to build, you know, into these networks.

And obviously these people are, you know, also users. and ultimately I would say that, you know, these new fintech credit card companies that give cashback in crypto, they're, you know, destroying the competition. I've seen some numbers, and the numbers are wild, very impressive, and it's barely getting started.

This is just the beginning. So the landscape in a few years from now might be very different. Today, when Osiris does feel a little bit like a cypherpunk utopia, like high inflation, terrible government, but the youth clandestinely, you know, using crypto for absolutely everything. Like another small story of Vitalik's visit. Like there was one morning that Vitalik went to a coffee shop at 9.30 a.m.

And the coffee shop opened at 10 a.m. So Vitalik was like, okay, it's closed. Let's find a different place. And from the inside, the owner comes out running and says, Vitalik, Vitalik, don't leave. Please, I will open the shop for you. Come, stay. And Vitalik mentioned me that he was even able to pay with Ether for his coffee and his croissant or whatever he had.

Like those things are showing me that, wow, you know, this is the owner of a bar, a random bar in the neighborhood of Palermo. Suddenly, you know, got starstruck when he saw Vitalik open the shop for him. You know, he was already able to receive Ether for the coffee. It's not like it's a strange thing. A lot of shops are accepting Tither or, you know, something. kind of stable coin. A lot of shops asking the question, can I pay with crypto? It's no longer like, oh, here comes the nerd asking about crypto. It used to be like that. When I did it seven, eight years ago, I remember, hey, can I pay you with some Bitcoin, you know? I remember doing

that in some places and teaching people. But now it's like, yeah, yeah, sure, pay. You know, pay with ether or with Bitcoin or whatever. That thing becoming commonplace is a very, very positive thing. How does Ethereum's fees impacted how Argentines have used Ethereum? Because if Italic is paying for coffee using the L1 blockchain, I don't know how he sent Ether to this coffee shop owner, but if it was on the L1 or if it was on an L2, and overall, how has Argentina navigated Ethereum fees? I didn't ask him that, but fees are a problem, of course, are a problem. A lot of people, actually, I hate to say this, but a lot of people are using some of the, like,

BSC, finance smart chain, or like some of the... more centralized EVMs out there. Pretty much EVMs, I have to say. When we talked to Vitalik, when we recorded with him, he said that the majority of crypto use is just using Binance.com or Binance The Exchange, not even Binance Smart Chain, just like transferring to each other using Binance.

Yeah. There's still a lot of education that needs to happen for people to be able to really hold their keys. Binance has a strong presence in the country. You will see billboards and advertisement of Binance all over Buenos Aires. I think we'll probably see more adoption of roll-ups. You know, I'm pretty sure about that, some of the side chains.

But definitely some of the other blockchains like BSC and stuff like that helps people to deal with fees. Like a $10 fee in Argentina is a lot of money. I can consider this a country where the minimum wage is $400 or something like that. So $10.10 used to be like the standard fee for something Ether just some six months ago. probably now is even a little bit worse. So people are relying on alternative chains. But this makes people, you know, it makes people resilient and knowledgeable

and, you know, easily capable of, you know, bridging among many chains. And the users are learning the ropes. They are learning the ropes of how to manage a world with, you know, multiple chains or, you know, a world with roll-ups, which I'm sure is going to be the endgame situation. we will find in a couple of years from now.

What about private key management? Are people trying to learn how to manage their own private keys, or are they just sticking with custodial solutions? I think many are probably used in still custodial solutions or trading inside the exchanges, like you mentioned. But there comes the responsibility of us, the developers or the most knowledgeable voices in the community to not your keys, not your crypto,

and to keep on insisting through social media, through different channels. I do a podcast in Spanish. Surprisingly, it's now a top five podcast in Spotify for Spanish-speaking audiences. Congrats, congrats. So it's interesting to see that there's a growing audience of listeners that want to learn about crypto in Spanish.

And through media like that, I think we have the responsibility to help people really learn how to use this technology properly. I'm confident that people get it and will learn and will adopt best practices. for sure. So you've brought up a proof of humanity and UBI a few times. So I want to go into that. But also at the very beginning of this conversation, you talked about how one of the big problems that Argentina faced was that the government just kept on electing to print money and just

hand money out as a solution without really considering the long-term consequences of these choices. So how do you square those two things? You've seen a government print money and have that not work, but you're also interested in universal basic income via proof of humanity. How do you square those two things? And can you also just explain for the listeners what proof of humanity is? Yeah, that's a great question. So proof of humanity is a decentralized identity service built on Ethereum, built on the layer one, where you have to generate a proof of yourself.

It's a small video. You are not required to use your real name or legal name, nothing like that. and once you submit the proof, you need to get a vouch from someone that has already been proven, and you have to put a deposit that you will get back if no one challenges your proof. If your proof looks similar to someone else, or you have already done a proof before, or you look like a deep fake, you might get challenged, and that challenge goes to an arbitration system that is Cleros, that will try to find a judor randomly,

and that will decide ultimately whether or not the profile is a duplicate, or is a deep fake or a robot or something like that. And Kleros allows for multiple appealing rounds, so it works very well. Proof of humanity is really thinking about identity in a post-Facebook world. You know, Facebook has centralized identity in a dramatic way, leading to surveillance capitalism,

to manipulation, to polarization, to polarization of society. The advertising business model combined with centralization has led to modern democracy looking really, really weird. So thinking about identities is very important. Edward Snowden said the one vulnerability being exploited across all systems is identity. Identity is the matter of all battles. So understanding how we can formalize human identity,

ideally in the most privacy-preserving way, but also in a way where you have absolute certainty that there are no duplicates in the registry and there's not an entity clandestinely managing multiple identities. Having that kind of permissionless ability to audit the registry is extremely important in order to keep the registry decentralized. And proof of humanity achieves this through a combination of game theory and leveraging systems like Cletus.

We launched this in March 2021, so the project is not even a one-year-old. but in this process we have almost 15,000 identities or humans registered in proof of humanity and once you become registered you start accruing UVI tokens

so this is a standard ERC20 token that you start getting it gets streamed into your wallet so you will start getting fractions of UVI every second or every block at the rate of one UVI per hour so obviously the issuance of

UBI is, you know, very aggressive. It's 720 UBI per month per human. Right now the token is trading around 15 cents, which is roughly around $150 worth of UVI per month. You know, price goes up, goes down. It's a free market, so it has supply and demand. The supply side of the equation, obviously, is tied to every new human that emerges in proof of humanity. The challenging side is the demand side, right? How we get the, whales or people accumulating this token. We don't, you know, monetary policy, you know, monetary schools of thought

indicate that the more you print, you know, when we talk at the beginning of our interview, that will lead to inflation and losing value of the currency. You know, I'm not foreign to that idea at all. I think that the interesting thing of what we can build with UBIs, this is a token that simply has one rule.

Every human will accumulate this token at the rate of one UBI per year. out. That's the rule. Now, as engineers, now we must work with this constraint. We must figure out how with this constraint, we can make sure that the value being received by the people in proof of humanity is the highest it can possibly be. In that regard, there are a wide range of ideas out there that have been implemented that were really surprising in this first year. I remember on a Twitter thread, someone said, why don't you do an endowment model, like Ivy League universities in the US? Harvard has an investment fund with $500 million.

They invest that money in technology companies, bonds, stock, whatever. And they generate a 10% yield every year. And it's that 10% that funds the university. The extra $50 million that are sustaining the university. The endowment is kept being invested in good assets, good stuff. If I wanted to do that in the traditional world, I probably should be born in a place where I can go to Harvard and get a lot of connections and have the right people and talk to the right, you know, become very powerful and maybe I can pull something that off in traditional finance.

On DFI, I can just, you know, talk to my friend Emiliano in Italy who contributes to WIRE and figure out, hey, can we do a vault where we use deposit ether and we generate some yield by lending that Ether to the market, and we use the yield to burn UVI. And from a Twitter thread to completion, it took three months. And we launched these bolts where, you know, people who are holding EIF, they can deposit the EVE into the vault, or some people that are holding stable coins, they can deposit stable coins into the vault. This will get landed through the wire and protocol.

We'll generate some yield, some profits out of the lending process. and we use half of the yield to buy and burn UBI tokens. And that's just one of the first applications that tries to burn UVI at scale. There's now an interesting group of teams, different teams, trying to do NFT games. When you transact, when you trade the NFT, a percentage of the transaction goes to burn UVI tokens.

So suddenly thinking about video games that have purpose, there are not just entertainments, it's a way of like, okay, if I spend a lot of time playing this video game, at least the more I play, I am burning, helping to burn UVI. So the more I play, I'm helping

to everyone that is receiving universal basic income over Ethereum, and it breeds a little bit more purpose or less guilt when you find yourself playing a video game. So there are a lot of NFT projects that are looking into that direction. I'm actually contributing to one of those that I haven't announced yet.

And it's super exciting, like, suddenly figuring out, okay, maybe if this game works out and if it reached significant scale, the whole play-to-earn movement, when you plug a video game to burning UBI tokens, you're planning purpose to a video game. You're playing something that has a social impact and benefits people's lives. The stories I heard from people receiving UBI are amazing. I heard stories from people that were able to, when Vitalik, he bought almost 2 million UVI tokens and burned them. He did this with the Shibha Inu tokens he received. The fact that he coordinated the Shibha Inu to burn UVI was like a very impressive thing to see happen. And when that happened, I started receiving stories from people that, you know, they were able to afford the plane tickets to visit their parents after two years of pandemic or who were able to afford. their student debt and they got this huge problem out of the way,

or they were able to, I remember a person who told me, who thanked me the fact that UVI gets streamed and not given in discrete allocations because her partner was addicted to gambling. So the fact that we didn't give all of the money at once, but just tiny bits of the money in real time was a feature that she liked how the protocol works. So I heard a lot of stories like this.

And there's a power user of UVI who lives in LaVana, Cuba. And he has himself and his entire family are on proof of humanity. And he's making probably $150,200 worth of UVI per month in a country where the minimum wage, or the maximum wage actually, is $20 a month. So this guy is making, you know, he's putting food on the table for his family. And, you know, we have a lot of users in Cuba, in Venezuela. It's the beauty of decentralists. and not working with, you know, the traditional banking system.

You know, these are all small stories today, minimal stories that are emerging out of the community. But I think that, you know, the more we can coordinate with other protocols, you know, we have been talking with the optimism team. Optimism is using 1% of its fees to support public goods on Ethereum and they committed a million dollars into that. The optimism community used quadratic voting to choose what public, public goods they will support.

Proof of Humanity ended up being there, so we received funds from optimism that can help burn UBI tokens. I think that the effort is not dependent on us, the proof of humanity community alone, but the more we can plug the UVI burner smart contract into other protocols, other games, other DFI solutions, a small contribution to burning UBI or to simply buying UBI. It doesn't need to be burned always, but a small contribution to that impacts all of the people registered in proof of humanity. Yeah, of course, the supply side is clearly gives us a challenge, but I think that as a community, we can build solutions that can help burn and reduce supply at scale. And when that happens, you will immediately notice how it's impacting people's lives. I saw that the day after Vitalik burned, my inbox exploded in people with thank you notes and saying how fantastic this was and that they will keep on holding or they will keep on, you know, building. Obviously, you know, it's an experimental thing.

Everything is a prototype. Even Ethereum is a prototype. We're all learning here. But with UVI and proof of humanity, it's been almost one year. Almost $50 million worth of UBI transactions happened in this year. of course maybe a lot of people were trading and speculating it's a free market but with 15,000 people registered on proof of humanity it's probably one of the largest if not the largest universal basic income

experiment happening right now and to me that's mind-blowing that Ethereum can achieve this because when we talk about you know Ethereum the social Ethereum is not going to be like social media which you know Twitter and Facebook gave everyone a voice and we know we all know what social media did to the world and it's probably you know more on the side of fantastic things than on the side of bad things like social media has been incredible in the last decade but when you think about that social blockchain it's not media it's not media social blockchain is people's money people's pockets it's people's ability to buy bread to buy food to to do you pay their expenses so when social ethereum emerges and

and matures, it can really address very big questions or very big challenges that the world is facing. One of these big challenges is poverty. A lot of people live under the poverty line, the vast majority of the planet. In Argentina, I grew up facing this reality every day where half of the people you see in the city are suffering, are living under very bad conditions. And if there's a technology that can help address that and put some money to people, so we make sure that everyone is able to meet their needs, then it's a very powerful thing. It's not just, wow, how much wealth this thing can create.

You know, if you become wealthy alone, it's not really wealth. We're really when you are able to impact the community, you are able to impact society at large. With Ethereum, I think we can do that. To miss a scary thought, but in the next couple of decades, end poverty with crypto. That should be a fantastic goal that they didn't address.

And that speaks of what the social capacities of the network can unleash. Another incredible thing is that it's a level playing field technology. Someone in Cuba will get the same amount of UVI than someone in Connecticut or in London or in Beijing. It helps to level up the playing field. It's a borderless. It's global. We're not asking for identity information related to the passport or to your government. We don't give a shit about that.

it's humanity first. And I think there's an enormous community around the globe that is willing to support the experiments with UVI. If we need to wait for the governments to do this stuff, it's going to take a long time. The great thing about crypto is that we don't need to wait for anyone. And I think that's a very promising thing. Like if Ethereum and Cryptos, a technology can help change the world like that, then it's not just a technology, innovative.

It's something way more profound, probably even revolutionary. I want to ask, what about crypto makes you optimistic, but I think you just answered it. What else about crypto makes you optimistic? You know, there's a physicist called David Deutsch, who I love. He's a great thinker of quantum computing. He's the father of quantum computing. He was, I think, one of the original authors of the original paper that described the quantum computer. and his request of the recent years is he's trying to change the language of physics.

He says like, you know, every single equation in physics is the dynamical particles, particles moving around either into the future, into the past, and this is just a very reductionist model of describing the universe. And he has this theory of, he calls it constructor information theory, where he says that information theory has always been shielded from physics. like whatever happens inside computers, it happens inside computers, and the physical world is entirely a different thing.

And the world of physics is completely blind to the world of information theory. So David Deutschke comes with this theory called constructor information theory where he says that we have to change every equation. We have to start thinking about the world on whether things are possible or impossible. And use this analogy to describe the universe

under more information theoretic concepts rather than dynamical equations that had led to this gridlock of quantum physics and general relativity not understanding each other. This philosophy of thinking about things are possible or impossible, an outcome of that that David Deutsch, I heard him once mention in a lecture,

he says, well, anything that it's not explicitly prohibited by the loss of nature is possible. it's not a matter of if it can be done or not, but a matter of how we will get there. But eventually it's something that it's possible. And he argues that optimism is like the gravitational pull of this idea. Like if something is not explicitly forbidden by nature, then there is a way.

History shows that we have always found a way. We humans, you know, in the industrial age or in the alignment or in the electricity or information, we keep finding a way to get there. Maybe this century will find a way to get to Mars. Maybe we'll, you know, but we keep finding a way. So, you know, optimism might be much more ingrained into nature than we can think of.

If there's something that really has impacted my life and gave me an overdose of optimism was meeting the Ethereum community globally. I remember very well when I went to my first devcon in Prague I was still a bit shy of getting into Ethereum coming from Bitcoin, many years of Bitcoin, you know, maximalism, I know the feeling, I've been there. But when I discovered a community that it was so pluralistic,

so diverse, so open-minded, experimenting and trying out innovations, and fuck it, we're not going to just change money. We're going to change identity. We're going to change voting. We're going to change human coordination. We're going to change every single institution thinkable. with this technology, that's like an oasis of optimism all over the place. Layer zero is the secret ingredient.

Whenever I lose some of my optimism because I'm human and we have our days, I try to find when the next Ethereum conference is happening, where in the world, and make sure I hang out a couple of days with my friends there and realize, holy shit, where, yeah, this is still happening. The dream is, you know, alive and kicking. And the best part is that it's, you know, it's still the very, very early days. I'm pretty sure about that. So you have to keep on building. And it's very hard not to be optimistic when you're surrounded by so many right minds, generous people. And with great leaders like Vitalik himself. He's probably the ultimate example of what leadership means in the 21st century.

We are just lucky. He's alive. He's here. And he's hanging out with us. us dream about the future. Oh, Santee, everything you just said I absolutely resonate with because it was the infectious positivity of ETH Denver that pulled me into Ethereum in the first place. So I definitely resonate with that. And also my pinned tweet on my Twitter account says, Optimist shall inherit the Earth. I think we're definitely aligned there. Santi, thank you for coming on Layer Zero and telling us your thoughts and your story.

David, a pleasure talking to you as always. And yeah, hopefully I'll see you in. some ETH conference anywhere in the world. Certainly. Santi, if people want to follow you on Twitter and also learn about proof of humanity, where should they go? I'm Santi City on Twitter,

Telegram, whatever, everywhere. And proof of humanity. At proof of humanity on Twitter, telegram. On telegram, we're actually proof humanity. That's the English telegram channel, and there's many channels in other languages. And proofofhumanity.

ID. And democracy. on Democracy.Earth, actually on Democracy.E.E. You will have all of the links to proof of humanity and UVI. The Telegram, Discord, snapshot, it's all there. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ante.

My pleasure.