 Konnichiwa. My name is Maurice. I work for the Ethereum Foundation. What is Lagos all about? If I would summarize it in three keywords, I would say blockchain, social impact, and energy. But Lagos is not only a hackathon in Lagos, Nigeria in February 2020, focusing on decentralized energy solutions. It's a conference, it's an educational event, it's a hackathon, and it's even more. So, who are we and what will we present to you today? SMNC from UFOT Consensus and actually from Lagos will present you a little bit more about the Nigerian context for you to get a better understanding on how we got there. Guillaume Ballet, Core Ethereum Developer, will tell you about the concept of these Lagos and its schedule. Benjamin Onurara, who leads the African blockchain alliance, will tell you about how we will manage that this event will have an impact on the real world. So, let me give the stage to you, SMNC. As I say, I'm going to talk to you about Nigeria. So, Nigeria is a very rich country. And when I say rich, I mean, I'm talking about it in three, with three aspects. The first thing is a lot of people do not know that Nigeria is the first place in Africa that crude oil was first discovered. And it's also the place in Africa that's the largest producer of crude oil and also with the largest reserves of crude oil in Africa. Two, Nigeria has the population of 200 million people. So, it's the most populous black country. And the city of Lagos has 20 million people where I live. And that is like, so it's one of the largest cities in the world. And you can compare it with Tokyo, with New Mexico City. And in that same Lagos, there is a huge tech startup ecosystem, which is one of the largest ecosystems in Africa. And we have really talented talented developers. I'm Nigeria, I grew up in Nigeria, went to school in Nigeria, I had an Nigerian assistant, and I'm one of those talented developers. And regardless of all these things, there is an energy crisis in Nigeria. 41% of people that live in urban areas like Lagos do not have access to energy. And even if they do, they have maybe three to four hours a day. And some of the people that live in the rural areas do not have access to energy at all. They don't even have power. And I'll give you more insight to that. I grew up in Nigeria, I was born there, went to school there, and all that. And as I was growing up, there was this term, like I said earlier, three to four hours of power, then power goes off. Till next year, sometimes two days, five days, one month. It sounds very weird for some people that have always had power every day. And when the power comes up and I was a child, we used to say this thing, up nepa. But up nepa means like the power holding company, the company that generates and distributes power is called acronym is nepa. So people would scream up up nepa because for goodness sake, five days, no power. And then, and then now that I'm children still scream up nepa. So you can just imagine how long this energy crisis has existed and it's still there. And people that have power have to have like for me to do my job, I work for concern, it's for me to do my job in eight or seven, or three alternates about air and sources of electricity so that I can work with my teammates and really can tell you whether that's enough. Would you answer my question? Now imagine how hard that is for you, then imagine the technical system, how hard it is for them to develop, to build something with those challenges. Thank you. Yeah, so precisely, how do we make this happen? How do we build something? There's been a lot of experiments made in the 80s, the 90s, where people were trying to bring, you know, very well-intentioned people were bringing their building, building things that the locals didn't need so they were very quickly ripped apart to turn into something else. So clearly, the solution is about making those people who have the problem tell us what they need. And we believe that blockchain can enable that. I mean, this is what the technology would build. We want it to be useful and hopefully Nigeria can provide this fertile ground for ideas. So we're going to gather those people and provide a hackathon, but one of the problems that happen in hackathon is even though you have a lot of talented people and Nigeria certainly has a lot of them, they don't necessarily understand blockchain, they don't understand energy, which is the program we focus on. So we need to make sure that they have the right background. So we're going to bring experts, professionals, we're going to have, as part of the conference, of a greater conference, we're going to have the Prime Minister, the Minister of Energy, that is going to give a keynote. We're going to have the German Development Agency that is going to bring experts to train those developers on energy solutions. And of course, we're going to bring community, like the Eastern community, we're going to bring blockchain knowledge. So this is the program of the event. We're going to start, like I said, with some training. We're going to make sure that those developers are not thrown in the cold water. And then the hackathon starts and decodes for three days. At the end of it, we finally select the winners. Oh yeah, one thing, so we bring a lot of partners, of course. And I forgot to say the GIZ, the German Development Agency, has a talk at DEF CON, so go attend them, the formidable people. And yes, that's actually not the end of the story, because after the hackathon is done, we don't stop there. Hi everyone, thanks for coming to our session. So yeah, we want to make sure that the projects that the winning teams, because it's not a big problem that I said as described, we want to make sure that the winning teams continue to evolve into sustainable projects that then continue to solve that problem. So we will be working with them to make sure that to help them with partners like the GIZ, there's a department of decentralization, I believe in Berlin. There are a whole lot of partners that are very interested in this, so that the program of the project or the winning teams actually gets into being a sustainable project. Also, helping to point those winning teams or winning projects into other funding sources, you know, within the ecosystem like the EF, GID coin, even the UNICEF and a whole lot of other groups. So not just win a hackathon and then we move on and go on to the next, but no, they're going to sustainable projects. And just as a background also before that, there's been a lot of community development efforts in Africa. We've done a lot of meetups on Ethereum. We're running several developer programs, especially with Concepts Academy to keep training developers. So a lot is going on in the ecosystem. So we're just going to build on that and also continue with them into sustainable projects. So one of the examples of what we hope to come out of Eat Legos, an example is a project called Reborn Blockchain. It's totally unrelated, but stay with me. Maybe you'll see the connection. So it's a team gathering around Ethereum. Like I said, there's a lot of team and community development efforts that has been done already in Africa. So this team just formed organically from different hackathons and meetups. What they're trying to do is to use incentives to solve the public health adherence problem. Apparently it's about a one trillion dollar problem. So it's to incentivize practitioners, health practitioners as doctors, nurses, health workers, and patients for healthy behaviors. And when these three groups are incentivized, you know, it's believed that the health system will be more efficient. So we want projects or winning teams from Eat Legos to be like this, that form organically. And this is a shining example. And they also be at Eat Legos. So we invite you to come and see them there. One last thing is Eat Legos has been working with a whole lot of groups. Ethereum Foundation has been very kind to spearhead and drive this initiative. The German government development agency, GIZ, they have a solar mini-grids project in Nigeria. So attendees and participants will have what we call a return on, what's that Boris again? Return on experience. So being at the forefront of innovation, where we will actually plug these winning teams and participants to an existing large-scale implementation that's trying to solve the real problem. So GIZ has a solar grid project in rural areas that's adding a lot of value. And we can only imagine what the scale is if we have the blockchain element and the innovation that the young people come up with. And of course the ABA also working. So I think our hand over to Maurice to wrap it up. Here we have a little slide about the team members of Ease Impact. Ease Impact is a legal entity we are currently setting up. It's a German non-profit and it helps us to empower East Lagos but also to help to incubate the winning projects. And afterwards we are willing to organize more similar projects in the development world. So Ease Impact, East Lagos is the cave of Ease Impact. So we are reaching out to all of you developers, energy engineers, entrepreneurs, sponsors, everyone who's interested. We would love you to reach out to us. So how could you participate? It's very simple. We actually launched our website yesterday, eastagos.io. You'll find all the relevant info there. And here is our Twitter account on the website you'll find a riot chat where you can ask questions and applications for participants will open soon on the website too. So don't hesitate to catch us if you're seeing us around as we'll be here during the whole week. And that's it. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm like five minutes for questions. So do we have some questions? Thanks Benji. Yeah I was hoping you might go into a little bit more practical examples of how the population of Nigeria are actually using maybe like Bitcoin or any other alternative cryptocurrency in the digital age. So 90% of my business is still in Nigeria. I've been responsible of DEF CON for the last three years. It's called BitCart and we liquidate gift cards that actually people in Nigeria live on and we liquidate that through Bitcoin. So to survive on Bitcoin and those customers who I'm actually sharing these slides with right now from Lagos who you know I guess it is kind of an educational gap but they are very very like they've adopted Bitcoin in a massive way. I don't know can you speak to anything that you mentioned? Can you speak to that or the other lady who's interested? Let's see. So there's a lot of interest but there's a lot of crypto speculation right in Nigeria. I'm speculating on the crypto and the price that is what they know only and in my opinion I mean I speak for myself I think that is toxic. It's not what the ecosystem means to speculate on the price. We need to move into an era where people actually understand the technology of the power that it has and what they can build on it. So we've done a lot of work. We've done three or four or five I don't know a theory of meetups in Lagos two or three hackathons. So there is that awareness that okay this thing is more than just something I can buy at five thousand dollars and cash out at ten thousand dollars. With that as well that you said there are a lot of scams too so people equate Bitcoin with pyramid schemes because a lot of people say oh yeah you know you're putting this amount of money you get cash out like this amount and all sorts of products and services that they have so when I told my mom and I said Ethereum or Bitcoin she's like oh don't work with those people I'm like why Jesus there was a pyramid scheme I said no it was not a pyramid scheme. So those are the things that we're working very hard to change even within the alliance we are running a developer program we always do blockchains with executives with all sorts of people open door sessions we're also engaging and funny enough even regulators are also associating Bitcoin and crypto and blockchain as a scam you know. So I don't know if that answers your question there's a lot of work we've done but there's an uphill task in terms of education and changing people's mind that this is not an investment it's not something you buy and you sell at a certain price it is not a pyramid scheme it is not all of these things you're thinking about it's a powerful technology that you can use to do a lot of things. And hopefully this what comes out of this will show people that this is not just crypto there's so much more and it can actually be used to solve real pains and that's what I'm hoping this will do too. Any other questions? Okay can we take maybe two of the questions and then we can wrap it up. Thanks yeah you're picking up maybe on the someone that's the same question I guess but isn't like the in terms of the the payment or form of currency where you have a competition with Naira with a Chinese high inflationary is that already like a step ahead where you can like have a bigger opportunity to get to people apart from the speculation aspect of course but still I mean in terms of in terms of currency stability and stuff like that or how does that like pressure people. So it's very difficult to move the Naira especially for remittance and stuff like that so there is an opportunity there the other thing we're talking about is to have a broader blockchain week conversation so we'll involve the regulators there and have that conversation but yes that is a big problem the currency is very inflationary you can't move it around and it's a general problem in Africa so that's why we need everybody to sort of have those broader conversations also but yeah the opportunity is there. The last question I think we have one two. Any more questions? Just a question about sponsorship, can you speak to any of the sponsors that have come on board already and what kind of brackets are we looking at? So for now we're still on fundraising but we have some partners like the German Development Agency called GIZ they are involving partners from the energetic sector the German energetic sector because they are very interested in having this return of experience because you can try out things in Nigeria that you cannot try out in Europe it's difficult to set your energy to your neighbour in Europe but you can do that in Nigeria and we'll be able to try out the developed solutions on these mini grids in Nigeria and this is very interesting for them so we have some of them we have also people from our ecosystem who are showing a lot of interest like Gitcoin and others yeah we're reaching out to a lot of people so we have from the sponsors we have international organizations we have our blockchain ecosystem and we have the energetic sector so it's kind of a wide range that's it all right thank you very much again