# Living on Ethereum by Ale Machado | Devcon Bogotá

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 25:47
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-wqMQ3tJlrhg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqMQ3tJlrhg

## Description

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more.
https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/living-on-ethereum/

To maximize the real-world utility of the Ethereum network, ether and ERC20 stablecoins must be increasingly used as money. This means being able to pay for goods and services without going through exchanges or banks. This talk will give a short history of the best efforts so far at onboarding merchants, dive into the anthropological reasons why this is a hard problem, and share our learnings on some recent successes on growing the number of crypto consumer purchases.

Speaker(s): Ale Machado
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: adoption,merchants,bankless

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

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] I want to talk about two different groups of people we here are vibing on ethereum right we all go to the Raves or we try to go to the Raves and and make it in one piece um we like hack in the basement like proud to be here in this conference and uh you know among friends again like it's it's it feels very nice to be here surrounded by people we love people that are vibing with us there's another set of people that we discuss much less which is people that are living on ethereum right people who actually use ethereum as a tool for their everyday life and of course there's an overlap between the two right like some people here probably get paid in crypto or in ethereum or ethereum stable coins some people might spend some of that every month and uh yeah that's that's one of the things that I wanted to like bring your attention to that the fact that there's two groups there's an intersection middle but in general I think we or myself given that I've like dedicated my my time to explore this space because I care about financial inclusion and I care about the like good potential for this technology um even myself I haven't I feel like I haven't dedicated enough time to talk about the other group so I'm going to talk a little bit about what I've learned but first uh that's like recognizing that like which which group would I be a part of like do I live in ethereum or not um this was in 2018 two good friends and and I uh hacked on um Ethan Buenos Aires I was my first ethereum event ever and again like the vibe was great this is where I got to meet the community um and we hacked on a project that was like non-financial nothing related to to using ethereum as money or like stable coins weren't even a thing back then um and uh it was it was great Community it was it was a good experience um and then coming from Venezuela like experienced High inflation so this is like gives me another reason to Vibe with the community you know like the values of uh having better money giving people access to better money and all that uh but the fact is I went to school in the United States and I have a bank account in the U.S uh and I'm part of that like group of financially privileged people that many many of us also are right I care about you know FDIC insurance I care about like having stable Savings in dollars and I know that we are Building Services now that are approaching those levels or or maybe even will beat those levels of um resilience and and trust but um we're not quite there yet so I mean I use credit cards and I enjoy their convenience um so if I were to be completely honest I'm part of this first group of like more vibing on ethereum than than living on ethereum so I've tried to get closer to the other group by uh asking questions by seeking them out especially you know people who were maybe not so much in the intersection because I'm sure here in this conference we can find people in the intersection but people who maybe dislike ethereum or maybe not even think about ethereum much uh people who wouldn't come to a conference because or for to attacking conference because ethereum doesn't mean as much to them because they have other parts of their life that they value better and that there's nothing wrong with that I started working at bid refill it's a company that's been around since 2015 um it focused on Bitcoin in the beginning but now there's uh other uh coins and tokens that that we accept and it's very convenient for example to refill a phone so if you got your your cloud of SIM cards that you got on this conference you can go online and top them up and it's an a lot of countries and this gives me the opportunity to talk to people who are not necessarily using ethereum or ethereum or services on ethereum to because they Vibe with the community they're not part of the community but because they it gives them a superpower that they didn't have before which is it could be filling up a phone it could be uh other other services that we offer as well like buying gift cards you can offer offload your crypto that you have without necessarily going through a bank account um and so on so uh well it's nice to talk to the people in this conference uh and uh you feel like in your comfort zone um I think yeah like I've started to to talk more to to like customers to be refilled in particular here uh and I can't say that I've learned that much yet from them but I have it like sparked my curiosity and and I think I have more questions than answering this talk but I hope that you can also get questions from from my expirations uh so far so I've got two archetypes here uh that I want to discuss right so the first one is George he lives in the USA he worked in oil and gas and what he wants is to make money fast and there may be some people here that also conceive ethereum as a good investment tool and as a as a way to invest smartly in protocols that will change the world and you know but that you'll get rewarded for it nothing wrong with that George in particular remember he doesn't care much about ethereum he wants to make money fast asks like what like who wouldn't like that right uh and uh he can use any means that he deems uh you know uh moral legal uh convenient to attain that goal so in 2019 maybe he was uh working as an Amazon reseller so he used websites like these to like engaging activities like like Drop Shipping or just like flipping products identifying products that uh would sell for a premium uh because he thought this would be a good way to make money fast fast forward to 2020 and he discovered etoro right and you may be familiar with it and then he started trading Forex right and he wasn't particularly interested in the financial world in in the beginning but he saw this as a way to make money fast and you know it's evolved into this uh as like a side job right then in 2021 he discovered uni Swap and uh suddenly he became an ethereum user uh but not necessarily an ethereum Community member right because I remember this guy doesn't really care much about ethereum he cares about making money fast um and now in 2022 of course he's using binance because uh you know all of these options to earn money you know uh the Vault the investment is taking all those new verbs that will be invented soon um it's so much you know like there's so many options here so you could say that binance kind of superseded ethereum for for this guy as the way to fulfill his goal which is making money fast um let's go to another case uh Sylvia is a copywriter from Argentina uh and he wants she wants access to a US dollar account because she doesn't trust her National currency much you've heard this narrative many many times I'm sure you've probably met people from Argentina from Cuba from Venezuela from other places where the situation is extremely bad and I I think we would all agree uh that the Community Values um are that there's nothing wrong with wanting to have more financial stability in your life so um remember she doesn't really care much about ethereum she's not part of the community she doesn't Vibe with us you wouldn't go to the rapes but she wants Financial stability so in 2019 she discovered tether on ethereum fees were pretty low at 10 cents of a dollar so maybe she got paid in that she had a wallet maybe it's metamask and and she got paid using tether and then she used telegram groups to offload that into uh her Argentinian bank account just tried to preserve the value of the dollar as much as possible before actually cashing it out to to the bank right and you know now there's better options for this but in 2020 uh suddenly the fees were fifteen dollars right and everyone remembers this um and then what did Sylvia do she just switched to Tron because again tether has been a tool that that has been around for for a while you may have your opinions about it and you know we as technologists may have some concerns or some fears about it um and certainly the same with Tron uh but guess what it's a tool she doesn't really care much about the technology she doesn't care about the community she cares about not spending 15 on every transaction that she makes so of course she switched there and then 2021 maybe the few went up a little bit but you know she's still happy with Tron and then again in 2022 uh she switched to using binance because you know binding space now ubiquitous she can pay for anything and if she ignores the casino part of binance that doesn't really interest her uh binance is a crypto bank and uh now nowadays there are people building like crypto banks that have uh maybe more aligned goals um with us than uh than binance where you know maybe it's not so uh driven towards uh participating in in like money making activities just like the first guy the George but just to preserve the value like more like your typical bank account experience so and then it's also convenient because she doesn't no longer has to use her telegram groups uh she can just go on a peer-to-peer Marketplace about finance and she can find an offer really fast um and uh it's also like it's very cheap uh the the fees for this services are cheap and uh to receive or send uh UCT within binance users it's free so again convenience wins in this case so after that in 2022 what might happen maybe she will convert from tether to busd it's um because you know maybe binance will provide further incentives to USB USC um so what about you know why doesn't she use as Technologies and as part of this community we may ask ourselves why doesn't Sylvia use optimism arbitrim like ZK sync why why doesn't why isn't she on die like is it is uh we would like her to be on like part of better align and more credibly neutral systems and the systems that have her well-being more in the core values because what can happen if the Tron Network goes down and Sylvia loses her money um or you know there's there's many risks with other like with using other tools that have not been built with uh you know the same care perhaps that that ethereum or the some of the tools of ethereum at least have been built so um we would like to kind of push these tools to her but we haven't done a great job at marketing them we haven't done a great job at um making them uh accessible in the markets where they are needed most right uh so she'll probably gravitate towards uh Finance right so I think this is um just again like it strikes a question uh that I've had for many years and I think I still haven't resolved it yet so who is ethereum for um and who like whom should we prioritize and and how how should we measure our success um is tvl for example a good way to measure ethereum success uh uh or is adoption in peer-to-peer markets uh a better way to do that um so maybe I want to open it up um I know like this this talk is uh short on purpose because I actually want to hear more from you uh and your experience and and maybe complement the two examples that we just showed here um if anyone here gets paid in crypto and is comfortable like sharing an experience uh and I can I'm happy to go first um I've been paid in uscc uh sometimes and my experience has been that uh because I studied in the US I can cash out usdc one to one for US Dollars in a bank account which is what I ultimately want because I I like that stability right even though you know there's huge inflation whatever it's it's uh it's still a means for me to preserve my uh my savings that's way better than for example keeping the money in Colombian pesos or keeping the money Venezuelan Believers obviously right so I I use that Tool uh to be able to to cash out with like no fees like that I think I'm bothered by it by having even you know like a 10 or 15 fee because I mean I I want my my salary whole right so maybe that's uh something that is again very privileged because I have access to to things like coinbase and so on but um maybe someone like Sylvia that actually prefers usdt because it's more liquid in her local market has a different experience so if anyone here has an experience of being paid in crypto I'd like to hear from you what um what do you use like what uh or or what product have you been surprised by The Experience be it good or bad um and uh yeah what what can you share from that if uh if anything so maybe I think there's going to be a couple of volunteers here with Mike's uh and if anyone raises their hand I will just call someone randomly over there um hello yes oh I'm here in the back sir you come see me I see you okay great so my name is Mel I get paid in usdc and in eth and in our companies token and I use a Visa debit card called monolith to do all of my payment so indeed to solve like the problem of how do you actually live on ethereum like to you know like tools that tie back into the real world very easily are needed yeah okay that's cool um do you have any concerns with uh the Visa card at all or has it worked smoothly for you always so it does work very smoothly but indeed because it's a non-custodial wallet you have to actually send uh anything well you you do a an ethereum transaction when you top up the card and so there are gas costs which for myself is fine but for a you know 100 million user base you know people use a base that might not quite work and so your point in your presentation I totally understand how you know we here in this crowd are very idealistic but um you know normal people or Ordinary People they just care about ease of use and less fees and getting the job done rather than these idealistic concerns and have you used other chains other than ethereum or have you considered using other other stuff or or maybe even you know you're using a custodial Service uh so it's another Ledger that they have as well so you're you're using more than just ethereum um and that's that's fine but I I think it's uh it's worth also highlighting that ethereum doesn't stand on its own or at least it doesn't we would like it to be like a full Suite service but it's not yet right yeah it's going to take a lot more work from people in this room to realize that we should be building for the general public and not for ourselves really in the long run otherwise you know companies like Tron and binance they're gonna eat our lunch right and we're going to be sitting here whilst the whole like the whole world moves Us by yeah I think I've actually been surprised by the fact that electron is under discussed in in conferences like this like you know it's not good to focus on a competitor only right uh but it's something that like many people aren't even aware that it's eating our lunch and it is uh and uh yeah I just think uh some more people should be aware of it and we should again have the right metrics in place because I I had a really tough time looking on like doing dashboards and defy llama and places like this to actually find the information that was more towards you know like users and and how many people were actually using these things rather than you know tvl and uh other metrics that I don't particularly care much about so yeah I I think like our goal here should be to improve the Weld and to take civilization along with us and um I love your talk because you're kind of giving us a a reality check so well done thank you thank you thanks um I have another question then um anyone here uses crypto to cover expenses you already covered that and you use your Visa card anyone has like a different experience doing that here yes yes here here okay I see you yes uh thank you for your like presentation um I think it's like here in Latin America we Face a really huge problem when we want to make the opraham from our crypto uh let's say I I also received my payment from my salary in in USD in USC USD usdc yes yes um and also another in tokens so let's say like this in the the part that I received from usdc I just save in my custodial wallet and the other like in my non-custodial wallet because at the end of the day the one that is in the custodial wallet I use for like day by day cash and pay my stuff um here would you mind sharing what what service that is yes here in Latin America is like a wallet which is named Bo uh which make here in Colombia the the the off ramp of peso Colombiano so I use that um but yes like that is one of the biggest concerns regarding how we make the the overrun of my money uh because there is not so easy channels for withdraw my money and let's let's be clear in Latin America how everything moves by cash we will be there in some years but nowadays we need cash and and that's how I solve like everything my expense is here so if you had one request for people building systems like these or if you were yourself like I had the resources and and and wanted to build something like that like what what is the biggest problem that you face yourself that uh like when when you're trying to off ramp the crypto that you've been paid you know you use that crypto to cover expenses exactly what would you say uh I think one of the biggest concern is easy access to this alternative that are already linked with traditional players because at the end the of ROM should be or they have they must be linked to traditional Financial system so I think that is like the big concerns for the future is like how at the end the the next wallets the net uh solutions that help us this are already linked to the traditional system to a traditional Financial system because these are the ones that will give us the chance for for a spread the use case of crypto yeah thanks I think we've dreamed for a long time of uh it's like adoption like merchants and uh like the circular economy and that beat refill we're trying to make that happen by uh listing private businesses on our site where you can like buy Amazon carts you can buy Uber you can you know pay up even your credit card in the US now it's a new service that we have and um and then you can pay it with crypto of course we're still intermediary but it gets us one step of the way um to actually making this crypto easier to use um so just one one more person there thank you um well I wanted just to cover um our experiences with bitso because I'm from Mexico um we got very lucky we got a universal basic income through proof of humanity so to cash it out for my mother-in-law we used bitso so we had to transfer we had to swap the Ubi token in a stable coin then we send it to Bitter and uh sorry sorry which statement was it um I think it was in usdc and then it was swapped for Mexican pesos and cashed out in um Mexican bank account but the experience in Vito is very simple and my mother-in-law could do it alone so that was the positive part and she manages to cover some of her expenses through um well through the universal basic income she gets so yeah thanks for sharing um and what what about the fees were you satisfied with what you were charged or what do you think like because I think we want everyone to have kind of the same level of access right and it's very difficult to maybe have uh like on on coinbase again in the US you can swap usdc for dollars one to one there's no fees right because they want to promote that uh and I would like everyone to have that kind of American privilege if you will but it seems harder to do in Latin America I don't know how your experience was like there yeah I think that the fee was bearable like I don't remember it being anything overwhelming the biggest fee was transferring uh swapping um the you and the universal basic income token in a stable coin because it's on mainnet um but we did it through cow Swap and they have some gasless swap so well there are perks you know but it doesn't have um fees that are that big yeah cool I think we may have time for maybe one more person can we get a mic over here one more question you got like a minute so really quick uh it was pretty funny you just pretty much the first guy you described was me I'm a patrol engineer they found a different way to find a there we go e-commerce work and eventually get into crypto so it's pretty funny but besides that I think they uh there is a huge difference in type of markets there's people that want to invest and there's people the one that just use right yeah and uh that's one of the things that I love you you talk about because there's a huge destination at least in South America and how can we do what you're saying I'm also American so I can have the prayer of be able to just do Exchange in the US but in South America is so difficult in um I don't know why in this at least in this I was hoping to find the answer here yeah but I could not find anything I've been pretty much you have to be able to talk yeah and I have not in in I know that everybody's trying to build the next ecosystem but I think they we have to start from like you were saying understanding what the real people want to do and like right now in South America there's a huge need for this technology to decentralize many things but the financial is for sure one of the biggest one and I think they I mean if I can if somebody here is developing so many tools at least try to think about to create this ecosystem and be able to make it easy for everyone yeah yeah and the way I was doing it before was just like trying to identify people who really need it like Venezuelans argentinians regular people uh but that I think is a lot harder than finding people who are already using it but not for the reasons you think or and they're not vibing with us again like they're not part of this but they're still using it so like try to get the jobs to be done from from that perspective and for sure and another thing I think uh I know sometimes some people see marketing as like the devil or bad but I think it's so much need of like people to know what it is you know how many times I talk to people and I say I do cryptos and they seem like the devil is because they don't understand it they don't know what it is and like well that is fake it's just not so thank you all right that's done thank you [Applause]