# Ethereum Everywhere Santiago Palladino - Devconnect

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-12-09
- Duration: 30:04
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-FzJBV3oSUns
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzJBV3oSUns

## Description

Speaker: Santiago Palladino
Event: Ethereum Day (Devconnect Argentina 2025)  
Keywords: Ethereum, decentralization, Argentina, crypto community, global innovation

Ethereum, Everywhere (All at Once)
Ethereum's impact goes beyond the strictly technical or financial. The decentralization ethos nurtures and defines its community, as shown by hosting its main conference in this corner of the world, and opens the door to communities regardless of their location or area of expertise. In this talk, I'll go through the impact of Ethereum in Argentina and vice-versa, and reflect on ten years of this movement that transcends technology by uniting developers, artists, economists, and dreamers. As Devconnect lands in Buenos Aires, we'll explore how this gathering can bridge the local and global, and how can we all make the most of this week together to plan for the next years.

About Devconnect  
Devconnect is a week-long gathering of the Ethereum community with events for developers, researchers, artists and creators. It’s organized by the Ethereum Foundation and took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Nov 2025, with ~20,000 attendees. 

What’s next  
The next major Ethereum community event is Devcon 8, happening in 2026. 
For updates visit: https://devcon.org

More  
Follow us: @efdevcon · @ethereum 
Learn more about Ethereum: https://ethereum.org
And the Ethereum Foundation: https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

Thank you, Benji. Um, thanks all of you for being here. Um, it's an absolute honor being here on stage and even more of an honor having Deb Connect here in Monocitz. Okay, I'm going to piggyback on some of what Isabelle and Mariano have already been talking about and I'm going to start with um with a personal anecdote if you guys don't mind. And no, this anecdote is not going to be about money. It's not going to be about financial struggles. It's going to be about something a little more more personal. When I was a kid, there was this show on TV called a big man's world. It was about a mad scientist who would basically explain science to kids using wacky experiments with a rat as a sidekick. And it was plenty of fun. Plenty of fun. And the nerd in me really really loved it. And on every show they would play they would place that that slide on saying hey if you want to if you want to send your questions to big man to bigman to get them to get them answered to participate in this show in a way uh just send a letter to that address. Yes this was letter email didn't exist back then I'm old sorry um and I remember going to my parents one day uh and asking them hey can can I send a letter? Can I can I participate in the show? and can I ask my questions to to this guy? And they said, "Um, honey, these are reruns. Haven't you noticed that it's the same episodes you're seeing over and over again? This is a show that aired in a completely different part of the world years ago, and we're just getting the reruns couple years later. It's not something you can participate in." And that was the first time where that I can remember that it ringed to me that I was somehow apart right that I was far away from the world from this from this media I was consuming there was a difference there was a barrier that I couldn't access um and as the internet came along this was consistent like probably for those of you who come from the US or from Europe are not too familiar with the screens It was very common to see content that you couldn't see like, hey, this is the thing that's happening, but sorry, you're not in a civilized enough country to to see it. Um, mandatory XKCD here. Yes, this was plenty plenty annoying. Like the fact that just because I was sitting in a computer from a different location, even though it was the same computer connected to the same internet, I was cut off from it. It was sort of infuriating. And it goes a little bit beyond that. Um, it's not just how we could access the world. Oh, sorry, talking about myself for saying, how I could access the world, but also how the world reflected back at us like how did we see ourselves portrayed in in mass media. I'm not not going to pick on the blatant terrors from Hollywood movies. Sorry, including them. So, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to pick on them. like a two-minute Google search would have told them that no those places are not there are not real for Christ's sake. Um but the recurring meme, the recurring trope that we see around Argentina was a place to escape a a place so far that you can start over and reset. Whether it's the trope of yeah, all Nazis fled here, that's from a Simpsons episode where Bart randomly dials when Osiris and Hitler picks up. Or someone in a troubled romantic relationship flies to this far away place that is Argentina and fights herself with a Spanish speak Spanish singer in a tropical beach. Never mind. um or end up in a location that for those of you who have already visited downtown know that actually doesn't exist. It's just a mish mash of other locations. But this the recurring thing that we would hear is Argentina is far away. It's so far away. That's a place where uh where you reset, where you start over, where everything is wiped clean. That's how remote this place is. Um, that quote is from Dexter episode from years years ago. I actually went into the Dexter wiki to try and find it and found that beautiful description of Argentina. Argentina is a location in a show. Oh, and by the way, it's also a real place, just so you guys know it. So, what we get is we're far away, right? We're cut off. And and by far away I don't mean just geographically speaking as many most of you who have traveled here have endured on the plane. Hey it's payback time. We always have to deal with this when you when we go somewhere else. Well, my point is being so far away, so cut off from this rest of the world, if you will, I think it's no wonder that when we found a technology where decentralization is not a bug but a feature, that it's an asset, we jumped into it, right? Okay, let me actually start with what I want to talk about to you today. Now that I've said now that I've given you some context of where I'm coming from, I want to talk about two things mainly. Uh one of them shill what Argentinians have been doing in crypto for these past 10 years or more and also go a bit through what are the different people the different profiles the different backgrounds that we need to build Ethereum. And the point I want to drive home is in this talk is we need diversity in Ethereum. We need geographical diversity. We need different areas of expertise. We need different domains. We need as many people to jump in to build what we're what we want to build. So let me start with a bit of history. Ethereum history in Argentina starts around 2012 and it starts with Bitcoin for a very simple reason. There was no Ethereum yet. Um if you can if you manage to read the organizer there for the Bitcoin meetup that's W Casares who eventually would went on to found Sappo that would be joined by Ripio Satoshi Tango a couple years later this is 2013 2014 couple years later then other major exchanges like Wit Bellow Lemon would come along and join all of them Argentinian founders Bitcoin meetups would eventually mutate into the actual formation of the Bitcoin Argentina NGO sorry uh who organized La Vitcom one of the greatest Bitcoin conferences in the world uh last iteration was just a couple couple weeks ago and it would even lead to the development of non-financial applications on Bitcoin screenshot there is from proof of proof of Ethereum built by local developer Manor and I'm going to pick on Manu for a second because he's also the guy who founded uh Volater which was the Volter house was a co-working space out of which many of the early projects of Ethereum came out from Bonosides. Um it's also dear to my heart because it's also where I met crypto. I ran I found myself in Voltera one day almost by chance. Remember sitting sitting next to this guy and being like hey nice to meet you I'm Pala. Um, I work on web two. Uh, well, not web two because it was a web, right? Like there was there wasn't another web. Um, what do you do? And he told me, oh, I work on smart contracts on Ethereum. And what the hell? Uh, yeah, it was built. Um so autofalter some of the most um most recognizable projects of Argentina came out opens up in decentraliz uh the centraland nomic who the who are the guys behind Harut and the moon wallet for Bitcoin but these are just the ones that started the Argentina ecosystem now is a lot lot bigger than that and I'm so sorry for all the teams that I'm missing from this slide but what I want to drive home is that Argentina has given the crypto ecosystem many projects, many major projects. And even for projects that are not on that list, um pretty much every team has Argentinian in them if you look close enough. Um, for some reason, well, not for some reason, for everything that we have been discussing so far, um, like the rate of web 3 to web 2 developers in Argentina is almost three times than that of the US. Hell, even great work at Aztec Labs. One in six engineers is Argentinian, and I'm talking about a company created in the UK. Um, we love web 3. We are naturally drawn to it. And I think that the reasons are half of them. what Issa also uh mentioned on her on her first talk during this blog and also this maybe this feeling of being cut off and finding in Ethereum a place where we can build we can thrive and we're welcome. So let me share a few more anecdotes again not about money but about the kind of things that this infiltrated Argentinians in the web3 ecosystem have been building have been working on. For me, my first experience into web 3 was auditing a smart contact language. Uh, it was Serpent. If you haven't heard of it, it's because we destroyed it. um coming from 10 years of professional development and all of a sudden landing into into an ecosystem where something I did from an office 15 minutes from here from this venue would end up having an impact where oh the guy who created a technology would publicly say hey no do not use this language anymore like there was a very direct impact a very direct reach that I saw that I could have from again from this corner of the world on this global technology that was being built at the moment and like the security community here in Argentina is incredible. Um there have been major critical vulnerabilities stopped by argent uh spotted by Argentinians in ENS. Uh that one's from the red guild fantastic if you ask me one of the most underappreciated teams in security in the whole ecosystem. These guys are fantastic. uh or they also spotted uh also Argentinians critical attacks on maker dao or hell even a supply chain attack on SMS that was leading to the stealing of hundreds of telegram accounts. Um by the way daily reminder do not use SMS for 2fa please. We also contributed a lot to standards. Uh my first five years in crypto were at open zeppelin. I had the chance to for instance build the ERC21 contract along with one guy who's sitting over there and facult as well and hell like that that code would eventually power the NFT craze couple years later it was written from here. Um there are over 20 improvement proposals written by authored by Argentinians. Granted half of them are just by Fran but still that counts. And hell, smart contact library written and maintained originally by just two Argentinian developers. Um, Nikon and Fran uh nowadays handles over $200 billion in assets. All of that code or J maintained from here. If you have interacted with any of these protocols, know that you have interacted most likely with contracts that were deployed from Argentina from a guy sitting in a computer around here. Like Mariana was saying a couple minutes ago in his own talk, like site deployment was actually happened from an apartment in Anmagra in a neighborhood half an hour from here. And again, like this is just without counting all the local teams that I already mentioned. how we even built you had fed a couple minutes ago talking about all the things they're building from lambda including an execution environment on their own like you can there are right now nodes on the Ethereum on the Ethereum network that are powered by code written here and contracts that are built using frameworks also developed by Argentinian developers hell hardhat has onethird of a million dependent projects as on GitHub Okay. And we also like to bring a little bit of ourselves also to to our contributions. Mariano Pro skipped this one, but uh one of his one of his most significant projects in a hackathon was actually Salow Dow which was actually smart contract for bribes. Like you could literally buy his voting power via smart contract. And yes, what you see there is a statue to bribes. It's on No Julio and I think No Julio Moreno, not too far away from here. Yes, there is a public building with a statue on the side. It's a statue that honors bribes. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that. Um, by the way, all of this is compiled in a beautiful initiative by the Cresinto team. Uh, you can check out that website. It has a massive timeline of all contributions from Argentinians to Ethereum to crypto in general. And to piggy to piggy back on something that Mariano said just a couple minutes ago, this is I probably overindexed on things that happened a couple years ago, maybe an artifact of me being an old guy by this time, but there is a new generation. There are new developers also flowing in and putting so much energy in in the ecosystem. That's that's beautiful. It's it's inspiring. and they're also making major contributions. Uh actually I I want to stop on one. Um yesterday there was the Ethereum Cipher Pan Congress on on privacy. On the main stage you would have Vitalic demoing Kohaku the new privacy wallet. And an hour later on the secondary stage almost hidden on the top floor we held a panel which included one of the developers who was the girl that was actually building Kohaku wallet who's Argentinian and works a couple blocks from here. But all of these contributions all of the all of these things that Argentina brings to web 3 are were not enough. Wanted to do more. We wanted to bring Ethereum here. And spoiler alert, since you're sitting here, yes, we succeeded. This all started in 2018 in Ethwenocides, which was the first ETH global community hackathon. It brought hundreds of people from all over the world. Shout out to Martina Ornella who organized pretty much the whole thing by themselves and eventually mutated into meetups that would welcome people like Andrea Santonopoulos, like Jenny from Zerion, like Horge from Aragon, like people from all over the world that were actually coming to a basement in Ariat again not too far away from here and join us in our crazy meetups. And yes, eventually this would lead to a talk by Mariano in DevCon 5. The talk was called living on DeFi, how we survived Argentina's 50% inflation. Now that number seems cute after having gone to 300% inflation. Um, but yeah, you have already seen that that picture in Marian's presentation. What he didn't show is that hey, I still actually still have the t-shirt. We actually printed t-shirts saying Devcon when Osiris 2020 to try to meme that into existence. I have saved this for over for over five years. I'm proud to be showing it now. So, you know, we made it. Um, I can't explain how proud, how honored I am that finally Dev Connect came here. It's it's incredible. It's pretty much a dream come true. And I think it's it makes sense not just because I love this country but also because it really shows that Ethereum is putting putting their conference where their mouth is right. It's like all these ethos about decentralization actually shows that is significant that it's act upon by hosting the conference here and and leveraging the existing talent that there is that hopefully I've I've convinced that that there is and also piggybacking on the existing user base. Pretty much one in five Argentinians holds crypto decentralized or centralized. We can argue for a long time on whether holding crypto in a centralized exchange is actually holding crypto or not. But these are people who already have crypto who have already been exposed to that and there an existing user base for you to tap into and and try to ship new things, new products and see what can be built. Let me shift gears for a for a second. Um, I know I've been shilling like how awesome Argentina is for hosting an event, for local talent, for everything, but the point I actually want to make is that if Ethereum worked here in this corner of the world, like far apart, it can work everywhere. Like I think that Argentina is the example. is just an example that shows that Ethereum is a technology that is actually borderless and can work in any corner of the world. And if our if sorry if Ethereum is a technology that can work everywhere, I think it's also worth stopping and seeing that it's so it also works for everyone no matter the domain and everyone is actually needed to build Ethereum. And with that, I want to move on to the second part really quickly. on who are the people needed for building Ethereum. Granted, I know we're in a conference called dev connect and dev starts stands for something. So for sure we need the developers coding smart contracts, coding dabs, coding whatever have you. But developers need languages to build on. Languages specific to smart contracts. Languages to build to that bridge other languages into the EVM into other chains that let them build privacy features that let them work low level that let them formally verify their their contracts and that needs specialized skill sets. Ethereum thrives on tokens. Like probably the first contract you learn whenever you jump into Ethereum is how to write an ERC20. And but tokens need a reason to be. And for that we have people who work in incentive design, in mechanism design, in incentives, in economics, in tokconomics. Hell, Ethereum even created a brand new discipline out of tokconomics. Or hell, if you will, mmetics if you are into coins backed just by an emoji. And again like this is not a technical feature like this is not something that require much technical pro pro um prowess. The creator of unis swap jumped into smart contracts hardly knowing how to code and well he built quite something. And other major feats in defi again were not powered by technical by massive technical leaps. They were powered by network effects by mimemetic like anyone remember the sushi swap bump vampire attacks? It was literally the same code base just with different incentives. We have gone through NFTs. NFTs that have uh gone from from status symbols to the way that artists can express them on chain and they actually were one of the main things that made it into mass med into mass popular culture. We've we have had experiments in social coordination in governance. Uh hell the DAO was pretty much one of the first big things in Ethereum. We have built toolboxes for creating new new governance schemes and experiment on them and play with them and like try to rally people around random causes whether it's public funding or hell what if we buy the US Constitution for whatever reason. We need people also that bridge the gap towards the more traditional work. Uh we had Danny Ryan this morning talking specifically about this which is like it or not needed if we want real world Ethereum adoption. And on the other end of the spectrum we also have the pirates the cipher punks. Um in particular I picked flashbots for for these guys because I really love the approach these guys took right um for those of you who don't know like flashbots works around me about extractable value. And what these guys do was sorry what these guys did was realize that there was a problem that there was value being extracted by builders by miners back at the time and democratized it. They illuminated the dark forest in their own words and built the tools so that anyone could participate in in in that value so that anyone just by having the knowledge and not by requiring a massive amount of money or compute or network they could actually participate in that. It was truly a democratization of the access to that value. Again we need already mentioned people on security. Uh web three on security is so much important than in web two. Also the payouts are different. How Microsoft nowadays is paying 40k for a critical remote vulnerability. Uh sorry remote code execution vulnerability. Uh probably reason why this is so important in web 3 is because of that we get hacks pretty often with a shout out to my favorites. Um we also need cryptographers. Cryptographers not just enable new fancy things like snarks for privacy for scalability of zero knowledge roadups. Uh cryptographies in the core of Ethereum whether like blobs are powered by KCG commitments. BS signatures power the consensus network nowadays. um node operators run the network at actually executing the software where our protocol runs. And last but not least, we need the researchers. We need the people, the core teams who are actually pushing forward evolution of the protocol itself. Um that's from the merge. Remember like we had you used to have proof of work at at some point we moved to proof of stake all the while keeping a 100% uptime. This is amazing. And again this was so powered by a very very very diverse group of people. If you just pick a group of developers and I myself I'm a developer, we cannot build this. And I know this is something probably not popular to say in a conference called Dev Connect. But my point is Ethereum is a technology meant to run everywhere and meant for everyone and to be built by everyone from every background from every place in the world. So with the one minute I have left, I want to pick a quote from Horge Luis Borquez. The Cimento team picked ALF as the name for their hub for their for their co-working space. And I think it's it's a very very good metaphor and it also applies here to the connect. ALF in this story is a point in space that contains every single other point beyond space, beyond time. And I think that's what we got here, right? like we got now 15,000 people who are interested in this technology all together all in the same space unddeinished with the capability to build something new. So what I ask you to do during these days is to connect with other people to gather feedback on what you're building to try to find partners, builders, users, investors to get out of your bubble, out of your comfort zone, and talk to as many people as you could, meet new people, interact with new people, and remember that innovation thrives on diversity, whether it's geographical, it's from backgrounds, it's from ideologies. So, please connect, build together, and enjoy this week. Thank you. [applause] That was incredible. Thank you so much. Um, you know, I think you you covered pretty much all of the things around Ethereum, around the culture of Ethereum, around the technical properties of it as well, all in one talk. That's very impressive. I don't think I've ever seen someone do all of that in one go. Um, how So, couple questions that we have. I think the one that I found most interesting, especially when you talk about use cases, is what is something you would like to see get built on Ethereum that is has not been built yet? >> Oh, that's a very good question. Um, I want to see something as far away from payments as and finance as possible. I think that there we overindex on financial applications probably and Ethereum is so much more than that. It's a coordination layer for social, for new experiments, for building different kinds of trust and networks of people. I want to see more stuff built around that. Uh I think with a yeah, with a stronger focus on on community as opposed to strictly money. Um what's great is I think like you're you're one of the few people um that I've seen that kind of like have gone through all the different routes of Ethereum where like you are onchain, you're going through the culture route, you talk about NFTTS, you're doing like deep cryptography stuff. Um what was it that clicked for you? Like was there a specific moment in your life where you're like I have to dedicate my life to this? Um is there some event? >> Ah it's a very good question. Um I think it's when I was actually the very first moments that I was starting working on it actually tinker with the tinkering with the tech. This was early 2017 and everything was so broken. Nothing worked. I swear you wanted to compile something to build to deploy the entire tool chain was a mess. and honestly see and at the same time it was something that it was clearly had a lot of potential that it had everything to be huge that's when I wanted to jump in where I said okay we need to put things in order we need to make this available to build something bigger and now is the time that we can jump into it and steer it in the right direction >> um switching on to Argentina >> yeah would you recommend web three founders come to move to Argentina. >> Move to Argentina. >> Existing founders >> for sure. Visit Argentina at the very least. Moving is a very personal life decision. I don't want to get into that. Uh but yeah, I think that aside from being a beautiful, beautiful country with a lot to see. Uh it shows a place where crypto adoption is more real, more honest, if you will, where crypto is used. Well, Isabelle made a much better case around economics than I did. Um but I think that genuine adoption leads to also a genuine user base to actually build something from there. >> Yeah, totally. I I've been like virtual remote working my entire life and the LF co-working hub was the only place my entire time in crypto where I can be in a room and everyone's working in crypto as well. >> Yep. >> Very rare there. I don't think there's another place in the world that comes close to that. Um and that's that's clear thing and especially with users. Um speaking of users, do you >> have like an ideal set of users that you wish or like set of people in the world >> uh that you wish were more into crypto? >> Oh, very good question. Apart from a group of friends from high school, I guess. Um yeah, speaking seriously, uh I think that I would like pretty much everyone to be into it, but at the same time not to be into it in the sense that I don't want crypto to be visible front and center to them. crypto sure it's for us it's an ethos like we build around it etc etc but for common people and from mass adoption should be another tool like I want people don't think what's using the bank for storing their funds uh if it's an Oracle or an SQL database uh I want crypto to be transparent to people >> awesome thank you so much >> thank you see you [applause]