[Music] H my name is si uh Welcome to our panel uh so we will start with the uh three of us and if Shin arrives then we probably welcome him over there uh yeah so this topic is something that is uh it might doesn't feel like so close to us but for many of us it should be very close to us uh we talking about today Global majority which is uh uh uh Global South and often time people talk about global South and the global North but Global South is actually where all the uh populations
are and if we're building something we should consider uh where they are and who they are and understand you know what kind of trouble and challenges they're facing so we can actually build a solution together so today we have a great panelist uh from Africa yev and then Jack from Latin America SII from Asia uh so myself I'm not going to share too much unless there is a certain thing that I need to share about Asia uh but I am Catalyst of pagoda which is Alliance of ethereum ecosystem builder in Asia so if you're building
anything etherium ecosystem related thing come talk to me later uh but without a further Ado I will love to hear hear from you guys and please uh give us a quick introduction why you should be actually sharing this topic in this stage probably start with Jack absolutely hi everyone a pleasure to be here I'm Jack Sako I'm born and raised in Argentina Latin America I'm building a plasma free with the inmax team and I have vast experience in the Latin America Market by providing Fiat on off ramp and payment rails throughout the last six years
and yeah building web 3 communities and projects around crypto to enable access to the majority in the mass Market hi everybody my name is ysf and I spend a lot of my time supporting Builders across the African ecosystem predominantly the individuals who are building the tools and applications uh that are bringing crypto tools and Primitives to meet the real needs people actually have a Ross the continent which we'll talk about more yeah so today we only have a 20 more minute to go and there's a lot to share because we're going to cover a huge
land of the uh the history and everything uh so we want to hear from yse first uh you know what is happening in Africa and then tell us uh what's E of Africa continent and then maybe we could hear from Jack same thing from Latin America and then we're going to cover some of the best use case is what plasma or decent technology can do and then we will go from there I'm just going to do a very brief intro of the African ecosystem because many of us don't understand it i' like to use this
map just to show actually how massive the African continent is you can fit the US India China most of Europe as well as Eastern Europe in the continent so it's it's huge um and beyond that as well we have a huge population and you can see the age distribution so the bottom line is the youngest and the top is the oldest so when you compare us to all the major regions in the world we are the youngest population um and I want to compare us with Japan here it is quite a stark difference uh our
median age is 19 uh your median age is 49 uh population is 1.4 billion and Japan is 122 so you can see basically a lot of young people and a very small number of old people when we look at the forecast for the next 25 years by 2050 our median age is just going to increase from 19 to 25 while in Japan we're going to be around 53 and our population is expected to double so we're adding two whole Europe to the African uh population size so this just gives you a a very brief sort
of context of where we are um we're very much internet native uh ecosystem internet penetration is growing at 6% year-over-year um a lot of our Builder deps are selftaught and almost all of us access the internet on our mobile phones and that's been very much transformative uh we have actually a lot of people growing to contribute to GitHub so open source is growing at a very large scale we've got several million Africans contributing to open source software through GitHub um as I mentioned earlier mobile cell phones is really where the action is at there are
93 subscriptions for every hundred Africans uh last year we transacted over almost a trillion dollars on mobile money which is basically your phone number is your bank account um and crypto transactions we hit 120 billion last year um and about 10 to 20% of the major economies you know population has used crypto uh a lot of it is in US dollar stable coin um and a lot of the challenges that we have still actually comes back to the very simple sides of financial application so in terms of getting a loan a lot of businesses run
on loans uh we pay 10 to 27% a month interest rate to actually access different types of loans we have major inflation um and there's huge SES of dollars um how many of you here drink coffee okay a lot of hands how many of you guys have drunk Ethiopian coffee knowing or unknowingly right so for example where I'm from Ethiopia we sell coffee The Growers sell coffee at a loss because that's the fastest way for them to access US dollars right so our like our biggest commodity is being sold at a loss because we need
more dollars so we have a huge dollar price discrepancy between the bank rate and market rate or the black market rate so it's a very unique complex challenge that we have there and we are 54 countries so to send money across we have to use the Global Financial system we have to use Swift and we spend 7 to 15% of every transaction on fees just to send money across borders right these are a lot of the friction points that we have lastly 500 million of us don't have any legal ID 40 African countries don't even
print our money locally so we actually get our money printed in the UK uh uh Germany and and France um which is a major issue and there's another area of topic which I'm not going to get into it's much bigger than this but 14 African countries don't even control their monetary policy so when it comes to sort of real world challenges um we have a lot of them and so we're we're really trying to address these complex issues and we're very excited what what ethereum and crypto can do for us thank you so much uh
we love to unpack more than all these challenges how can uh ethereum and then the central technology can help uh we love to hear from Lam absolutely very similar to what Yousef said um Latin America is a 700 million population throughout the globe we our main issue is both getting money in most of and inflation Latin America has a huge inflationary economy Argentina's last year econ um inflation was 150% yearly and throughout the course of this year has been around 80% we as Latin Americans save in dollars saving our strong fet currency however that is
and today the crypto use case and the most use case we find is a way to remit money back home and being able to save in a strong currency not owned by by the Banks meaning that having your own stable coins and your own wallets you are the one owning those funds you're the one having those funds and Bank can't seize those funds we had 20 21 years ago we had a bank run and people were unfortunately lost a lot of money couldn't retrieve their money from the banks because the banks basically closed and very
similar to to Africa we lose a lot on the international effect we have an official rate in Argentina it's 50% so everyone that exports any type of service it's first converted a 50% loss in a way and then taxed so that's why crypto is so big in Argentina everyone's getting their funds through crypto into the native rails into the domestic payment rails and most of it goes through a cash P2P transactions that accounts for 70% of the Local Economic Market we have 70% inal economy around 70% and 30% formal economy meaning formal economy being domestic
Bank transfers and a electronic payments and 70% being crypto payments or Fiat cash in cash out meth methods yeah thank you so much Jack they touched upon a little bit of like a use cases H you talk about imant and so on um back to Africa uh what do you think there is like um uh use case that start to kick off from the ground that as using crypto technology or any of the things uh that you see right so uh so I spent a lot of my time working with many of the ambitious Founders
on on the continent who are actually building the core Financial infrastructures of the continent and the pattern that we're seeing right now that will be huge and exciting in the next five to 10 years are basically building a new type of bank that is on chain that is not one entity but it's actually a lot of different pieces of a Lego that provide the services that people need the very simple Services I'm not talking about like defi DJ type of products I'm talking very very very simple the stuff that a billion plus people can use
from payments from Savings Credit uh uh Crow management uh creating different types of transactions that um you know are cross border uh Insurance like the foundations that actually make an an economy function and work um because uh even though we've done really well in payments locally that's within a specific country when you're trying to do payments at a global stage is very challenging so for example I've been talking to some folks here so I you I'm a fan of of what NOS save has been doing and the and the debit card I don't know if
you guys have seen it around but we have many African builders that have actually been doing that for like more than a year um that's because people are buying crypto with US dollar stable coin putting it on their wallet and then the wallet issues them a debit card to be able to spend that globally and why are we excited about that that's because our banks don't allow us to spend our money from the bank globally they have a limit they have a limit of $10 $20 very low caps and that's in the major economies right
so um getting an actual Global debit card that you can use with your crypto wallet is like a musthave if you want to subscribe to like a Google product that cost $12 and those are the types of problems that we're trying to solve the other part that I'm really excited about and seeing a wave is around stable coins and I'm not talking about just US dollar stable coins these are localized stable coins and and the reason is that um at the moment and this very specific moment the cost of payment transaction with a bank or
mobile money is five to 10 times more expensive than running a transaction on an ethereum Layer Two so we can actually save users 90% plus fees that they pay with existing Bank transactions or mobile money payments as it is as I mentioned to you earlier we're 54 countries right so let's say you and I are neighboring countries if we're trying to trade anything my money goes through like a US Bank all over the world wait five days and come back to you during that time my uh country's currency would have fluctuated your currency would have
fluctuated as well and we both have to use dollars so there's a a lot of movement and interest going to how do we actually just move the dollar from the medium of exchange to a unit of account and that what that means is actually deploying a lot of different types of stable coins across multiple countries so those are the the types of things and and lastly identity and reputation bringing Trust on chain when you have hundreds of millions of people not having um uh uh any form of legal ID bringing that on chain instead of
like selling that to some uh foreign corporate that's going to put that in centralized service and it's going to be too expensive for us to afford um so those are the types of project I think people are are working on building they're not like three-year defi projects that you're going to see sort of going up and down these are things that will be the core infrastructures that succeed so this takes time and that's why the world doesn't seem to keep paying much attention at least in the crypto world because um a lot of other things
moving faster than this but this is actually stuff that will last for a long period of time yeah to to close off like the the use cases Jack do you have anything else that you want to introduce from latam yeah absolutely extremely similar to what Yousef said we offer I build a Fiat on offer infrastructure in the past we do offer the debit card as a service to different exchanges wallets and ecosystems that want to give the end user the ability to pay everyday coffee everyday retail shop with crypto is enabling people that are getting
paid abroad people that do remittances the availability to spend those funds in every single day usage not having to go through the domestic banking rails today we offer super similar to Africa the same USD International transactions when you pay providers from China from Asia from the rest of Latin American countries most of the domestic rails right now are extremely inefficient take too much time um they're all dollar denom and they find that the best way to execute crossb fast crossb payments is always through um a crypto stable coin mostly or 99% of them is USD
USD or usdc today I think that um whenever regionalized Fiat currencies and Fiat stable coins are starting to go live in every single country everyone would have their own and basically the swap mechanism will the fees will start decreasing because the conglomeration of um liquidity generates that Market efficien Market efficiencies that today are dominated by Banks or Central um Central companies that that do that crossborder payments we are seeing so much of a decrease in time lead time and spread and effects that everyone sees the benefit of doing their crossbed payments in in stable coins
sorry I just want to speak on our behalf uh to kind of like bring it together is that uh I I want to bring it to funding and capital allocation and resource allocation there's hundreds of millions billions of dollars flowing around in the crypto economy right now around the world as grants as Investments liquidity providers and all of that and actually very little of that is actually going to regions in Latin America and a a lot less is coming to the African ecosystem I was at a dinner during uh uh CCC with a bunch of
Founders and some of them were joking saying that uh they made it when raising as a project they made a mistake showing Revenue because when they start showing Revenue it was very less likely for them to actually get funding because it kind of puts them in a trap and and I have a bit of an issue with that because um yeah you can have all types of business models um but but the interesting thing that the the types of projects that are being built here in in Africa are these are actually taking crypto Primitives to
the real people and that stuff last a long time so in Africa last year we had um crypto onchain transactions were going up during the bare market right this is like it's it's different from the speculative Cycles it was going up during the bare market and these are the types of things that are real businesses real projects so I'd encourage this people who are allocating resources is really think about the long-term lens of even how you can do grants or allocate Capital because the the value creation is a lot higher and more value created for
a lot less money thank you so much I mean like looking back hearing back from these two like one thing that really struck to me is like imagine having crypto as a debit card and spending everyday life it those sounds ridiculous to me as a Korean and so you know you guys are in Japanese like why would people B crypto on daily basis and that's like how different the market is but actually the real world use Cas is actually from these regions right how many of you guys are actually building something for Global Market okay
don't be shy it's okay raise your hands okay so many of you guys you know at least a minimum the half of you guys and I I strongly recommend for you guys to actually go visit and and we can because our friends from Africa and lot time cannot come here because the Visa issue there's so many issue that why we don't see them it's not they are not building because they cannot come so I strongly recommend everybody to you know just Explore More and then go and meet the real user a real Global majority to
really what is needed uh you know to this world and that we can use and contribute to the world so very last question we have a three minute uh for you guys it's quite difficult but what makes a plasma or decentralized hi we have a three minute yes he's going to be here sitting smiling uh we actually going to the very last question but uh Shin uh yeah just eding you here want to hear from very last words maybe one minute each about like what this decentralized technology is actually make it special in your region
and then what do you think is the attraction Point absolutely I think you touched on two two main points one is the decentralization and the other is plasmic technology I think that everyday use case ethereum build an amazing um new technology where we started building 10 years ago and we it iterated until what we find today when you find real use cases in Latin America and Africa and like the entire world mostly is transaction cost related so you're going to find that the main use cases are where lowest fees are finded and decentralization might be
uh Pro waron in certain aspects you'll find that today Tron is the largest used Network in Latin America to do crossb payments it accounts for 90% of the volume of usdt and I think that plasma with its technology to reduce fees and grow horizontally on the user acquisition side you're going to find that so many projects are going to start seeing plasma as the next technology in order to build the layer up and start having instant quasi instant and quasi free transactions to execute all the real life payments that we have today if you start
counting transactions per second or you use as Benchmark Visa or Master guard rails which are today's Financial um benchmarks Ben plasma has the avilability and the the potential to to reach there and have those transactions per second and enable cross region Cross City cross World transactions in a matter of seconds and extremely low fees which enable every single day to use either card spending remittance sending funds to a friend V mowing someone funds I think that that's the the main use case uh very briefly uh why I think why I like decentralization in this context
is because centralization has uh I think Africa's a lot of these challenges today are because of the challenges of centralization and we're trapped we're trapped under it and there's no kind of real way out of it we have less bargaining power uh we don't have a lot of capital in order to compete um and uh a lot of the historical context makes it really hard to kind of win in the existing centralized structures and we end up losing out and shut out from the global economy so the best path that we have is infrastructure that
no one owns is neutral uh we can build and shape it to however we want to do it we don't have to ask anyone's permission um that's a game Cher and and when you have new paradigm Technologies and infrastructures you're are able to build from first principles instead of carry the weight of everything that's been around for a long time so that's that's to me is what's most exciting and we'll see things that we haven't seen in other regions before because we're a very unique ecosystem um so sorry sorry for being late so um for
this question like you're asking basically what's what's the technology that made me so excited with my community right um so we we talking about the African Lam and so you can probably talk a little bit about where you're coming from which is I guess Asia uh so um and we actually over time so maybe I I already sent you the previous question is there anything one thing that you want audience to know before you leave this so uh I based in North America in New York and also I'm pretty active in the de Nomad community
so I think one thing I realized for especially in New York is like consumer apps so I I think there's definitely a high demand for like high performance blockchains because there's actually more and more like uh say in New York there's a app called black bir is basically a the centralized version yop so you can use to rate a different restaurants so you can get points from every every restaurant basically every in a sense like every restaurant launch their own token so basically right so basically for the customers I think it's great uh like consumer
engagement stuff and there's a lot of consumer app in New York also there's a online dating uh like show called un lonely that's pretty exciting in New York a lot there's a lot of people are crazy about the show so um consumer AB is very essential so I think that's why by the way I base have so much so high like uh uh transaction volume I think there a pav the way for future like um Monet and also uh in Max it's kind of like so fast and cheap blockchains but for digal nomad Community I
think um like identities make more sense because I also I'm Chinese I'm holding Chinese passport we have team members from India like we go to a lot of place we need a visa say this time I I I trying to go to Japan it took me like like two three weeks ahead to apply Visas so there's a lot of problems about ID and there's a different countries have their like d to Nomad visas and uh I I think there will definitely someone is working on like uh put them together make sure like there's all in
one uh identity solution or something to make sure people can travel or work more fre thank you so much uh thank you for joining everybody uh I will just end with uh one sentence like as you could hear from the consumer app to the very simple Finance to the uh you know some semi Finance with a a functionality every reason is building something different because the targets are very different but it's not one is more important one is less but we have to actually collaborate to build something amazing so uh please um you know pay
attention to different region and you guys are in Asia take responsibility and Def find what you can do and uh we trust in you guys and Japanese Community is amazing so thank you so much for having us and then uh feel free to talk to us later today thank you [Applause]
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