 Hey everybody, my name is Camila Ramos. This talk is super important and amazing to me because, one, I'm Colombian, I was born in Bogota, my family's Colombian, we can go through a whole journey of what this means to me to be back in my home country talking to you guys. But the one request I have is can someone take you pictures of me so I can send it to my mom and tell her that I spoke in Colombia. Thank you. Okay, cool. So today we're going to speed run this because there's so much to talk about and I only have 11 minutes. So we're going to talk about machismo, inflation, remittance, scaling a theorem for widespread adoption in Latin America. What does it mean from a technical level? What does it mean on a cultural level and how do we get there? So let's start with where we are today. I had to pull this out from back when I worked in product at Sony. We had this grid that helped us understand a product that we were building. You can build a product that solves a big problem for a lot of people, a big problem for a small amount of people, a small problem, etc. And where we are right now as we're in this quadrant where we're solving a small problem for a very small group of people, right? The amount of people that are using crypto today and that are actually getting something useful out of it is actually quite small. And this is what we end up with when we are in this situation, right? It's why we've kind of devolved to crypto dick butts and 1,000% APY. It's because we're trying really hard to find a use case for it and we just can't seem to find something that we can solve. And this doesn't go without saying like, obviously I deeply respect everyone working in this space. I know we're all working towards getting to this point, but this is just the reality of where we are. Now how do we get to this quadrant where we're solving a big problem for a lot of people? My answer is super simple. And I actually wrote a blog post about this that I'll link at the end where you can see all of the sources cited, but solve real problems. And that sounds very straightforward and dull, but how do we actually get there? How do we find communities that have problems that we can solve and we can take crypto for what it is at the very base level, which is new infrastructure for a payment system and enable innovative use case that will actually drive adoption? And the place that I'm going with this is we have to go where there's necessity. In the global west, in Europe, in North America, we don't have much of a necessity. We're relatively doing pretty well, right? We all have access to banks. We all can get access to all the different financial services that we want. And even for those who might not necessarily have access, we have a wide breadth of different Neobank and non-bank applications that let people still access these financial services. Now, besides going to where there's a problem, we also need to address on the technical level what needs to be solved, which is scalability and more secure applications. In the last, what, six months a year, there's been like billions of dollars worth of hacks. And the truth is that when you're dealing with a community like Latin America, which I'm going to make the case for, for why we should turn our attention and capital to Latin America specifically, you're dealing with a community that's a lot more price sensitive than the west, right? They have an average monthly income of $500 a month. You can't afford to lose even $100 in a hack. You can't even afford at this point to spend $10 on a gas transaction. It's just not realistic. That's like two lunches, right? So I'm going to make the case for Latin America real quick. So consumers in Latin America, actually, I think are the best place to start because they already exhibit behaviors that make them really ripe for adoption of crypto. And those are mobile-first digital payments. If you guys live in Latin America, if you live in Colombia, you know that a lot of financial services are mobile-first. Everyone pays from their phone. Adoption of Neobank. We'll talk about more what this means, but basically a lot of people are already operating outside of the traditional banking and finance system. They're using Neobank applications, a.k.a. financial services that are not necessarily from a proper bank. There's heavy reliance on remittance payments, which is basically cross-border payments. If you guys are from Latin America and you live in the United States or Europe, you know it's not uncommon for you to send money back home and it's done via remittance. Growing political and socioeconomic instability and social pressure. So we're going to talk about all of these in the next seven minutes. So I'm not going to read all these, but just so you guys can kind of maybe take a picture, take a mental screenshot. This is what the numbers look like for adoption of online Neobank and non-bank. So basically a vast majority of people in this survey that was created by Rapid, which is all linked at the end, sources cited. A lot of people are already operating outside of the balance. 90 plus percent of Mexicans, Brazilians, 87 percent of Colombians, 84 percent of Argentinians regularly use applications such as PayPal, Molo, and Macal Babel. Heavy reliance on remittance. So again, this is back to the cross-border thing. And according to data from the World Bank, remittance flows to Latin America and the Caribbean reached $131 billion. This is something that crypto is such a good use case for, right? There's lower fees, there's higher security, it's faster operational speed. So this is just a perfect example where it's like, how do we build a system for people who are already transacting and already exhibiting this behavior but can use what is offered by crypto to kind of unseat the kings of remittance, for example, where you're standing in a long line, you're paying $10 for a transaction, you're paying 5%. It takes like seven business days for the money to get there. And then a really interesting thing that I found in this World Bank data is that remittance flows actually account for more than a quarter of GDP in Honduras and El Salvador. So a quarter of the whole country's GDP comes from cross-border payments. Okay, and then let's talk about social pressures and the first one in this term, which is machismo. Now I didn't have time to go into a full analysis about this because this presentation is so short but if you look at these countries and you take a look at Colombia, all the Latin American countries up here, you see, oh man, the key got cut out but green means women and blue means men. So if you compare it to European countries, women are actually holding and transacting in crypto at a much higher rate than women in Europe. And in some cases, they're really close to the rate of men in Europe. So what does this mean? What does this tell me? Crypto in Latin America, you know, if you guys are in Latin America and there's this culture of machismo, which is like super rampant and for maybe Americans who don't know what it means, it's basically patriarchy with like a Latin America flair to it where it's like, you're not allowed to work, you need to ask me for money, you need to stay home, you need to like be subject to what I want. And that takes form in a lot of different ways, which we won't get into, but I encourage you guys to look at research. But what does this signal to me? It signals that crypto is offering a new way for women to transact and operate within financial freedom while still operating within the bounds of what's socially acceptable. So what does that mean? So what that means is you could say, oh, well, why don't they just go open a bank account? They're going to get mail to their house. Oh, why don't they just go like sign up for PayPal? They're going to get mail to their house. Like these are all things that they could run a risk if they try to, you know, break out of whatever kind of like limits are set on them. Okay, and now let's talk about how do we actually innovate and what are some examples of companies who have focused on solving hyper-local problems and have seen crazy growth come of it and how we can model this in crypto. So Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago. So Mercado Libre is like an online marketplace where people can buy anything, beds, clothes, tools, anything, and they started this platform over a decade ago in Columbia and they created this financial platform called Mercado Pago so that people could transact on it. And it started out as just for this, just for this payment platform. And now it's grown to be a whole financial service provider and they offer gateway services, mobile payments, and credit cards. So what does this mean, right? Like this means when you go to a place that has region specific problems and you solve hyper-local, you can actually drive use and innovation and grow into like this, this is a great example into like an entire financial service. And then we'll talk about one more. Pixpain Brazil is Brazil's dominant digital payments app with over 60 million users and they transact over a million dollars, no, that's a billion dollars in monthly transactions. Pixpain started not too long ago. It's the number one payment system in Brazil right now. Another example of like when you solve hyper-local, when you go to where the problems are, when you solve solutions for people who actually are facing real problems, you can actually see exponential growth rather than kind of focusing on this like place where we are in that weird quadrant that I posted earlier. Now scalability, now let's get into the, what technically needs to change that we can actually get there? So this is an introduction to fuel labs on the head of developer relations there and why I'm really excited about fuel and one of the main reasons why I joined fuels for my specific mission and ethos of scaling Ethereum in Latin America. So what needs to change? Scalability, right? Right now we just can't handle the throughput if we wanted to do something like Mercado Pago or Pixpain. It just, Ethereum cannot handle it at this point. So we need to scale that. How do we address that? So fuel, labs is building fuel, it's like a layer two but better on Ethereum. And we have parallel transaction execution because of our different execution models. So we have our own VM called the Fuel VM that allows us to do a lot of cool things like paralyzed transactions which just automatically gives you more throughput because instead of having to do one transaction at a time you can do many transactions at a time and right away you're already getting higher throughput right off the bat without sacrificing decentralization. So a lot of chains like Solana and stuff they can do really high throughput but they're sacrificing decentralization. What does that mean exactly? You can't run a full node at home. You own consumer hardware can't go spend up a full node and validate the chain yourself. That is the core ethos of blockchain. If you can't run a full node and have control over your money then we might as well just like all go back to using PayPal or the bank. Okay, more secure applications. So again, when we're talking about a price sensitive population with an average income we can't risk hacks. We can't risk this type of level of security if we actually want these people to use it. Now another cool thing about Fuel is we have our own programming language called Sway which is a Rust based DSL which means it's a programming language created specifically for blockchain development. Now what does that mean? That you can create a compiler that is very tailored to very specific needs and one of them is who's heard of a re-entrancy bug? Re-entrancy hacks, right? It's like where in a very simple case it's kind of where there's like a line to release some funds and then after you like flip a bullion to say true money has been released so that you don't do it again. Some programmers in some instances there's been a bug here where someone can go into your contract and basically drain it and get the money over and over and over before reaching that line in the execution of the code where it flips some flag to stop doing it. So now Fuel, Sway, our compiler has built into the compiler to say, hey, on line 47 you have a re-entrancy vulnerability and it will not allow you to build and deploy the contract until you address it. Another thing, the Sway compiler forces developers to handle all possible cases using enum variants. Basically what that means is if you've ever written a program to say, let's just say if the number is above zero, do something. If it's below zero, do something. The Sway compiler will tell you, hey, you've only written code to handle the true case or you've only written code to handle this case. You forgot to write code for this case and again, it won't let you build the contract. It won't let you deploy the contract until you address that. So the powerful thing about this is like you can never have kind of an accidental like, oops, forgot to handle that edge case. Okay, we're almost done. Finally, namespace storage. So if you've ever written contracts in Solidity you know you might have accidentally touched storage without knowing it and that could have some unintended consequences. So developers in Sway have to define what the storage access is for each function and this is what it looks like. You do these annotations that say, hey, this function can read storage and write storage or maybe it can only read or maybe it can only write. And what that does is that it's, first of all, it's very clear to developers who are writing the program. It's very clear to developers who are using the library. But at the end of the day, it's very clear to users who actually don't have to know what's going on. It's abstracted out obviously, but they'll never accidentally access storage and never accidentally cause unintended consequences in your program. And here's a link to the blog post that I wrote where you can see all of the sources cited, read everything in long form and yeah, leave that up for a second. Thank you.