# Understanding Latinamericans to Design a Local Flavour DeFi Platform by Diego Mazo

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 08:09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-jlLTym-fvCY
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlLTym-fvCY

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/understanding-latinamericans-to-design-a-local-flavour-defi-platform/

From El Salvador to Argentina, passing through Colombia, we applied local UX research iteratively with our own methodology TUD "Tropykal User Dive"  to define specific financial needs across different countries in Latam. This process has helped us to define a DeFi product designed for the needs of Latinamericans and with a highlighted local flavour. We would like to share our method openly to be replicated in other emerging economies around the world.

Speaker(s): Diego Mazo
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: UX & Design
Keywords: multicultural,research,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

We're here to talk about understanding Latin Americans and to design a a local flavor DeFi platform. So, the question straight to the point is how do we understand Latin Americans? And this is not a global question, it's more local question. But we use a unique method in our team, model we created. Yes, to understand all that we can with in-depth research and also combining with a community model. So, what we do is basically we try to engage, we try to educate, and we evolve with our users. But not they are not only users, they are contributors. So, we created a two-level community. One part of the community are the global community, and then we have the community builders. Why? Well, we want to create long-term relationships, and we don't we want to engage with our users. We want to to create value together, to co-create value, and growing together in a long-term process to to have a better product and to have uh contributors all along this this way. So, applying this model, we we learned a lot of things. We brought here five main learnings, and we'll go by by one. So, the first insight The first insight is that convenience it's decentralization for breakfast. What does it mean? Well, basically users, normal users, average users don't understand decentralization at the beginning. So, it's a gradual process and we need to help them, to educate them, and especially to have decentralization as an invisible concept. So, we we cannot ask our users just to have a UX or an experience that is so complicated for them that they will give up in the beginning. Then, as Latin Americans, we kill for dollars. Dollars are our store of value for the future and local currency is the enemy. And most of you probably know it. So, we need to also adapt to current mental models. So, in the crypto ecosystem, if you have a platform, probably you have several stable coins. But, this is a non-existing mental model. Uh current users, they will think there is only one dollar. So, we need to adapt to these existing models just to provide them a better experience. If we're talking about savings, we think, well, it's good that they our users, our contributors will learn about Web 3. But, first we need to teach them how to save. This sounds obvious, but it is not. Most of them in in Latin America in general is difficult to save. There is not a common habit to save. And uh if you don't choose the right path, if you don't know how to apply certain methods to save, if you don't have the tools to do it, you will have the you you will open the door of abusive loans, which is a vicious circle that it's very very difficult to exit. So, some of our users we we understood that it's very important not only to help them save, but also to educate them to get out of this vicious circle. If we talk about loans, as I was doing it, um first loans are hard to get in Latin America and harder to to pay. And uh we have high interest rates, we have a a big barrier that is the credit history, but specially I would like to to focus on conscious decisions. So, if we have the urgency to get a a loan, that's a a bad situation. There is no negotiation and probably we will get into this vicious circle that I mentioned before. So, we need to educate our users in our platforms to make conscious decisions. We need to provide them the right information to understand the consequences of their decisions because we are talking about financial products. We are talking about money and probably the well-being of families. And finally, our last insight is that trust is a is a scarce resource in Latin America. So, a scams are frequent not only in crypto, but also in any financial service and it's very very complicated to differentiate between uh um proper service and scam. Then, in general, governments don't protect us and people don't trust governments, so it's also a a big barrier. And banks take advantage of its privileged position. So, this it's a combination of factors which makes everything very particular and specially difficult. So, with all these that I've explained, we believe we are working, we we are building TropiGo that is the platform to to create better personal finances using web web3 and and Latin America. And just as a friendly reminder, we are not here for the technology. We are here for the impact. Gracias. What in your opinion are the top three low-hanging fruits what we can do as kind of yeah, people involved in the crypto ecosystem to foster crypto adoption and education here in Latin America? Mhm. That's a good question. Um So, I I think the the first part is as we said is education, right? So, we need to educate in in the tools and specially try to differentiate from scams, which is a big problem because this this many people is not trusting crypto. Um they don't have the technical knowledge, they don't have the the the the whole context. So, education I think it's the the main the main tool. And um Yeah, for for example, in in TropiGo we we definitely believe we need to use certain standards that are used in web2 to bring to web3. So, if we use uh uh web2 login without all the seed phrase or these kind of technicalities, it will help a lot to the average people to understand these kind of platforms.