# Opening Ceremonies - Skylar Weaver

- Speakers: [Skylar Weaver](https://streameth.org/speakers/skylar-weaver)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-09
- Duration: 05:54
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-iF6_JMf6CDM
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF6_JMf6CDM

## Description

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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.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

foreign [Music] ER I'm with the devicon team and I'm here to say to you all today and welcome back to Devcon we've wanted to say we wanted to say that for a long time a long time it's been three years three years since the last Defcon three years since we last met in Osaka Japan in 2019 three years of planning this Devcon postponing planning again postponing again and I must say it feels great to be here with you all today we're here to celebrate a little bit of what we've done over the last three years and what we still have yet to do and to make progress towards a lot of the outstanding items we still need to do into the future and we're excited for this reunion to take place here in Latin America and what's even cooler yeah Round of Applause for that no what's even cooler though is that there's representation from almost every single Latin American country here right now let's give it up for those from Latin America kinika as they Latin America [Applause] super for three years we've continuously communicated to all of them the same thing our goal was to bring Devcon not just to Colombia not just to Bogota but to the Latin American region as a whole and we emphasize this with our road to Dev gun where just in the past year we've seen 10 plus events organized around latam everything from ethereum Rio islatan Buenos Aires to Mexico City to Lima to Santiago to ethereum Sao Paulo to Quito to Bogota where we are now and soon to be Medellin in Panama uh coming up in the next couple weeks and this is just talking about major events this isn't talking about the meetups the many meetups that have happened along the way an important to note is that all of these events are Community organized events Devcon is the only one organized by the ethereum foundation the rest done by Volunteers in their free time because they care about ethereum they believe in what it's capable of and they want to improve this world not many communities have this much passion and soul but even still some of you've been asking but why Latin America I've seen some doubts and criticisms some of you on Twitter probably as well it's dangerous they say it's underdeveloped they say why bring our precious Community to a risky developing region when we could stay close to home in our well-developed comfortable countries and quite honestly I think that's the wrong idea ethereum is a coordination mechanism for all of us it allows things like greater Financial inclusion power over your digital assets stopping unjust censorship Sovereign control over your identity and many more and in my opinion ethereum can be most impactful today in developing regions around the world places where serious censorship really does exist where many don't have access to the basic Financial systems where your identity is not guaranteed nor owned by the individual where coordination failures are rampant in the form of corruption or even in the lack of public goods funding and as much as it might be more comfortable to stay in developed regions of the world that's not what we're here for we're here to use ethereum to make the world a better place and the world exists outside the comfortable bubbles many of us live in in fact most of the world lives in these developing regions and this is why we are excited to be here in Latin with you all to one expose the region to ethereum and the incredible community that composes it and to to remind the ethereum community about the types of problems we really are trying to solve with ethereum which is not what's the hottest nft nor where the best defy yield is or other similar distractions but rather how can we provide greater Financial inclusion a more accessible network with lower fees higher censorship resistance identity systems that are more accessible and Sovereign payment systems for the masses true digital ownership and much much more these are the problems that we need to focus on and we need to continue focusing on improving the world and continuing to improve ethereum to be able to do so and on that note I'd like to introduce someone who's actively been helping with just that someone who helped heard one of the largest coordination challenges in Tech History also known as the merch yes that someone is Tim Bako coordinator for all core devs so let's give Tim a big warm welcome foreign