Blockchain's Unique Potential: Transforming Lives & the Humanitarian Sector for Refu... | Devcon SEA

[Music] all right hi everybody my name is David Casey and today I will be presenting on real world use cases uh specifically Last Mile humanitarian aid for Refugee populations so a little background about myself um I've been playing with crypto and blockchain for a little over a decade uh the first use case I found was while was building my first startup which was an Airbnb style uh transformational experience booking platform um with about 800 locations around the world Eco Villages Retreat centers Etc and we were trying to uh find ways to off-ramp merchants in the global south from uh stripe to local Fiat and uh we came across Bitcoin it was like email for money and that was about 2013 14 and I was hooked um a year later we started playing on the colored coins B launching uh barter currencies on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and eventually that evolved into something I launched in 2020 on the cell blockchain called the resource Finance protocol and that was a cashless multilateral uh B2B credit clearing Network or in other words um asynchronous multilateral barter for businesses um I also work with C on the Venture side as a scout um working with entrepreneurs building Last Mile uh fintech and Payment Solutions um more recently I run uh two parallel uh sister Brands called funding the commons and Earth Commons um it is a uh public goods funding event series incorporating conferences residencies and hackathons and we just worked with Vivian and the pagota team on a residency in changai that just closed out yeah um last uh last late at the end of last month uh yeah so we work with uh Builders funders and researchers academics and the public sector bringing together uh conversations around uh how to better fund public goods so got very little time so I'll skip over that um we've been looking at uh how to Pilot blockchainbased public goods funding infrastructure in the real world and we think that um humanitarian aid for refugees are a very interesting use case for a few reasons um one identity refugees are often stateless as you've heard from the last speaker um banking Financial inclusion access to the financial system um opportunities to access uh money income Aid Etc in cash and not vouchers um Safety Storage of Transport across borders during conflict And archiving um as you also heard in the last talk um we think that uh refugees also help solve uh use case issues for the blockchain industry at large um I think blockchain has a lot of interesting potential use cases but it hasn't delivered on many of them over the past decade uh so briefly going into a couple Pilots um we are just completing the first one in Uganda where we funded uh two music studios using the Bitcoin blockchain actually which we H we hadn't used in a few years and um interesting to retouch it and see that um it is kind of the the place of most liquidity in parts of Africa still uh we uh are building two music studios and the these music studios are starting to uh produce uh music songs that we um have a plan to Mint as stories and share with the world um which I'll tell you more about in a minute um there is uh some pictures of the studio and the activities um this is a Burundi Refugee community in Uganda uh okay getting to Southeast Asia so we have been doing a pilot here in Thailand and Myanmar um over the past few weeks and we have some very interesting early learnings um so the first thing is that crypto regulation here is different than in other places um peer-to-peer payments are not legal in Thailand or Myanmar um so that's one interesting fact when doing crypto Pilots um ethereum mut does not have direct off ramps into Fiat um but the Stellar ecosystem does and that makes it compliant inside of Thailand um in Myanmar the areas of the country that are not under government control um don't have regulation at all uh essentially um except that to be sanctions compliant um according to the US you can't deal with um any uh military entity on the Burmese side um so the other challenges in Myanmar are vast um the government is bombing internet cafes you guys asked for real world cryp so here it is um and they have undercover agents arresting uh P2P off-ramp and liquidity providers so um it's a pretty gnarly environment to work in in terms of crypto humanitarian Aid um and more uh learnings to come soon uh upcoming we have a pilot with the cell ecosystem in Africa uh that we're preparing right now and uh where is this all going so we are working with uh kickstarters new crowdfunding protocol which is being launched on the cell blockchain early next year um and we are building a decentralized crowdfunding and storytelling platform uh for refugees around the world to crowdfund for infrastructure and specifically infrastructure that trains them how to uh generate media videos music journalism art Etc so if that's interesting to you um please come talk to me David Casey thank you thank you David interesting anyone uh any audience with a question for David it's a really amazing seeing the project growing over the past couple of months it's very new but uh solving Ro World issue is something I feel like we all have in our heart really appreciate that um any questions from the audience one over there oh let me try oh okay I'm sorry thank you sir thank you so much yeah you were talking a bit about the P P2P payments being illegal um but then how is it being executed like like how do they work around this because I guess like then that means mobile app stores are also not compliant or like they don't would not allow apps like that what what are the workarounds how can you actually execute do do you mean in Thailand or elsewhere yeah you said I think Thailand Myanmar is illegal like in Myanmar uh more than I don't know half the country is not under the control of the government and the military government in Myanmar is actually not recognized by the US government um so compliant crypto actually means not dealing with the government and Building kyc Systems that can exclude uh military actors um so that's like kind of like a reverse compliance uh which is a really interesting uh situation in Thailand um as far as I understand crypto P2P payments um direct wallet to wallet in a cryptocurrency or stable coin are are not legal in the current regulatory environment however um using an off-ramp like Ste like using the Stellar blockchain sending usdc um to their MoneyGram offramp and having a Tai person pick up at MoneyGram in Thai bot is uh compliant so that's the the current uh way to use crypto in this country as I understand it you can trade and speculate on crypto um that's that's fine on a centralized exchange like bitb um but yeah not not the actual use of cryptocurrency we have time for one last question over there hey thanks for your presentation um my main question is in this world what does crypto give you that web 2 does not if the um if the regulations are making crypto payments like hard or illegal uh does that also apply to to like you know normal payments great question so I can use the example of Myanmar um the banking infrastructure and all web 2 apps are under control of the military government as well as all the Telos um so like a fully independent infrastructure using starlink mesh networks and crypto um are really the only option that that many people have to actually get money into the country um and not have it uh at risk of being frozen or confiscated and them being put in jail and that's it for our time together on stage thank you again David thank you I know that was a little little dark that's year round cool uh the next one we have is going to be a a very interesting topic this is also at the really core of my heart uh