# Machismo, Remittence, & Inflation: Scaling Ethereum for Widespread Adoption in LATAM

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 11:37
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-2HP9MEUa1GQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HP9MEUa1GQ

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/machismo-remittence-and-inflation-scaling-ethereum-for-widespread-adoption-in-latam/

According to Gemini's 2022 Global State of Crypto Report, women in developing countries lead in the adoption of crypto among women. Particularly, women in Latina America lead in crypto ownership when compared to other regions, with 43% of crypto holders being women. We'll take a real world lens to the reality of LATAM and the need to scale Ethereum, the status of L2s, emerging modular blockchains, and how they all fit into the end goal of getting Ethereum transactions into fractions of cents.

Speaker(s): Camila Garzon
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: L2s,community,latam

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

[Music] thank you hey everybody my name is Camila Ramos this talk is super important and amazing to me because when I'm Colombian I was born in Bogota my family is Colombian we can go through a whole journey of what this means to me to be back in my home country talking to you guys but the one request I have is can someone take cute pictures of me so I can send it to my mom and tell her that I spoke in Colombia thank you okay cool so today we're gonna speedrun this because there's so much to talk about and I only have 11 minutes so we're gonna talk about machismo inflation remittance scaling ethereum for widespread adoption in Latin America what does it mean from a technical level what does it mean on a cultural level and how do we get there so let's start with where we are today um I had to pull this out from back when I worked in product at Sony we had this grid that helped us understand a product that we were building you can build a product that solves a big problem for a lot of people a big problem for a small amount of people a small problem Etc and where we are right now is we're in this quadrant where we're solving a small problem for a very small group of people right the amount of people that are using crypto today and that are actually getting something useful out of it is actually quite small and and this is what we end up with when we are in this situation right it's why we've kind of devolved to crypto dick buds in a thousand percent apy it's because like we're trying really hard to find a use case for it and we just can't seem to find something that we can solve and this doesn't go without saying like obviously I deeply respect everyone working in the space I know we're all worth working towards getting to this point but this is just the reality of where we are now how do we get to this quadrant where we're solving a big problem for a lot of people my answer is super simple and I actually wrote a blog post about this that I'll link at the end where you can see all of the sources cited but solve real problems and that sounds very like straightforward and duh but how do we actually get there like how do we find communities that have problems that we can solve and we can take crypto for what it is at the very base level which is new infrastructure for a payment system and enable Innovative use case that will actually drive adoption and the place that I'm going with this is we have to go where there's necessity in the global West in Europe and North America we don't have much of a necessity we're relatively doing pretty well right we all have access to Banks we all can get you know access to all the different financial services that we want and even for those who might not necessarily have access we have a wide breadth of different Neo bank and non-bank applications that let people still access these Financial Services now besides going to where there's a problem we also need to address on the technical level what needs to be solved which is scalability and more secure applications in the last what six months year there's been like billions of dollars worth of hacks and the truth is that when you're dealing with a community like Latin America which I'm going to make the case for for why we should turn our attention and capital to Latin America specifically you're dealing with a community that's a lot more price sensitive than the West right they have an average monthly income of 500 a month you can't afford to lose even a hundred dollars in a hack you can't even afford at this point to spend ten dollars on a gas transaction it's just not realistic that's like two lunches right so I'm gonna make the case for Latin America real quick so consumers in Latin America actually I think are the best place to start because they already exhibit behaviors that make them really ripe for adoption of crypto and those are mobile first digital payments if you guys live in Latin America if you live in Colombia you know that a lot of financial services are mobile first everyone pays from their phone adoption of Neo Bank we'll talk about more what this means but basically a lot of people are already operating outside of the traditional Banking and finance system they're using Neo Bank applications AKA financial services that are not necessarily from a proper bank there's heavy Reliance on remittance payments which is basically cross-border payments if you guys are from Latin America and you live in the United States or Europe you know it's not uncommon for you to send money back home and it's done via remittance um growing political and socioeconomic instability and social pressure so we're going to talk about all of these in the next seven minutes so I'm not going to read all these but just so you guys can kind of maybe take a picture take a mental screenshot this is what the numbers looks like for adoption of online Neo bank and non-bank so basically a vast majority of people in this survey that was created by rapid which is all linked at the end sources cited a lot of people are already operating outside of the bounce 90 plus percent of Mexicans Brazilians 87 of Colombians 84 of argentinians regularly use applications such as PayPal model and mercado heavy Reliance on remittance so again this is back to the cross-border thing and according to data from the World Bank remittance flows to Latin America and the Caribbean reached 131 billion dollars this is something that crypto is such a good use case for right like there's lower fees there's higher security it's faster operational speed so this is just a perfect example where it's like how do we build a system for people who are already transacting and already exhibiting this Behavior but can use what is offered by crypto to kind of unseat the kings that have of like remittance for example where you're standing in a long line you're paying 10 for a transaction you're paying five percent it takes like seven business days for the money to get there and then a really interesting thing that I found in this world Bank data is that remains flows actually account for more than a quarter of GDP in Honduras and El Salvador so a quarter of the whole country's GDP comes from cross-border payments okay and then let's talk about social pressures and the first one in this term which is machismo now I didn't have time to go into a full analysis about this because this presentation is so short but if you look at these countries and you take a look at Colombia all the Latin American countries up here you see oh man the key got cut out but green means women and and blue means men so if you compare it to European countries women are actually holding and transacting in crypto at a much higher rate than women in Europe and in some cases they're really close to the rate of men in Europe so what does this mean what does this tell me crypto in Latin America you know if you guys are Latin American there's this culture of machismo which is like super rampant and for maybe Americans who don't know what it means it's basically patriarchy but with like a Latin America Flair to it where it's like you're not allowed to work you need to ask me for money you need to stay home um you know you need to like be subject to what I want and that takes form in a lot of different ways which we won't get into but I encourage you guys to look at research but what is the signal to me it signals that crypto is offering a new way for women to transact and and operate within Financial Freedom while still operating within the bounds of what's socially acceptable so what does that mean so what that means is you can say oh well why don't they just go open a bank account they're going to get mailed to their house oh why don't they just go like sign up for PayPal they're gonna get mailed to their house like these are all things that they could run a risk if they try to you know break out of whatever kind of like limits are set on them okay now let's talk about how do we actually innovate and what are some examples of companies who have focused on solving hyper local problems and have seen crazy growth come of it and how we can model this in crypto so Mercado Libre is like an online marketplace where people can buy anything beds clothes tools anything and they started this platform over a decade ago in Colombia and they created this uh Financial platform called medical so that people could transact on it and it started out as just for this just for this payment platform and now it's grown to be a whole financial service provider and they offer Gateway Services mobile payments and credit cards so what does this mean right like this means when you go to a place that has region specific problems and you solve hyper local you can actually drive use and Innovation and grow into like this this is a great example until like an entire financial service and then we'll talk about one more pixpain Brazil is Brazil's dominant digital payments up with over 60 million users and they transact over a million dollars no that's a billion dollars in monthly transactions big space started not too long ago it's the number one payment system in Brazil right now another example of like when you solve hyper local when you go to where the problems are when you solve solutions for people who actually are facing real problems you can actually see exponential growth rather than kind of focusing on this like place where we are in that weird quadrant that I posted earlier now scalability now let's get into the what technically needs to change so that we can actually get there so this is an introduction to fuel Labs I'm the head of developer relations there and why I'm really excited about Fuel and one of the main reasons why I joined fuels for my specific Mission and Ethos of scaling ethereum and Latin America so what needs to change scalability right right now we just can't handle the throughput if we wanted to do something like Mercado Pago or pixby it's just ethereum cannot handle it at this point so we need to scale that how do we address that so fuel Labs is building fuel it's like a layer two but better on ethereum and we have parallel transaction execution because of our a different execution model so we have our own VM called the fuel VM that allows us to do a lot of cool things like uh paralyzed transactions which just automatically gives you more throughput because instead of having to do one transaction at a time you can do many transactions at a time and right away you're already getting hired through but right off the bat without sacrificing skill without sacrificing decentralization so a lot of chains like Solana and stuff they can do really high throughput but they're sacrificing decentralization what does that mean exactly you can't run a full node at home you on consumer Hardware can go spin up a full note and validate the chain yourself that is the core ethos of blockchain if you can't run a full note and have control over your money then we might as well just like all go back to using PayPal or the bank okay more secure applications so again when we're talking about a price sensitive population with an average income we can't risk hacks we can't risk this type of level of security if we actually want these people to use it now another cool thing about fuel is we have our own programming language called sway which is a rust-based DSL which means it's a programming language created specifically for blockchain development now what does that mean that you can create a compiler that is very tailored to very specific needs and one of them is have you who's heard of a re-entrant debug re-entracy hacks right it's like we're in a very simple case it's kind of where there's like a line to release some funds and then after you like flip a Boolean to say true money has been released so that you don't do it again some programmers in some instances there has been a bug here where someone can go into your contract and basically drain it and get the money over and over and over before reaching that line in the execution of the code where it flips some flag to to stop doing it so now fuel sway our compiler has built into the compiler to say hey on line 47 you have a re-entracy vulnerability and it will not allow you to build and deploy the contract until you address it another thing the sway compiler forces developers to handle all possible cases using enum variants basically what that means is if you've ever written a program to say you know let's just say if the number is above zero do something if it's you know below zero do something this way compiler will tell you hey you've only written code to handle the true case or you've only written code to handle this case you forgot to write code for this case and again it won't let you build the contract it won't let you deploy the contract until you address that so the powerful thing about this is like you can never have kind of an accidental like oops forgot to handle that edge case okay we're almost done finally namespace storage so if you've ever written contracts and solidity you know you might have accidentally touched storage without knowing it and that could have some unintended consequences so developers in Sway have to Define what the storage access is for each function and this is what it looks like you do these annotations that say Hey this function can read storage and write storage or maybe it can only read or maybe it can only write and what that does is that it's first of all it's very clear to developers who are writing the program it's very clear to developers who are using a library but at the end of the day it's very clear to users who actually don't have to know what's going on it's abstracted out obviously but they'll never accidentally access storage and never accidentally cause unintended consequences in your program and here is a link to the blog post that I wrote where you can see all of the sources cited read everything in long form and yeah I'll leave that up for a second thank you