Fresh From the Press: Key Takeaways From Santiago Blockchain Summit LatAm 2018 by KICKICO

It looks like crypto movement is switching to higher gears in Latin America, so is my interest for the region. The fellas have all the necessary spirit and revolutionary sincerity in them. When I listen to LatAmers, I hear much more than “grabbing”, “speculating” and “taking something home right now” (however, Bitcoin price expectations are discussed during every meetup). It is important that they question all fundamental economic principles, interaction between people and opportunities that blockchain industry gives to everyone. They are thirsty and hungry for knowledge and data, share thoughts and ideas openly. To some extent this can be explained with the continent’s united language environment (when several very different countries speak the same Spanish). But this barely explains it all.

So, hare is another good story for my readers all across the blockchain globe. Last week Chile’s capital Santiago hosted a major gathering on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Blockchain Summit LatAm 2018.

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That was not some party next door, quite an opposite: the world’s leading IT players had presented, and the event was highly ranked by all participants. My good friend from KICKICO Latin America office Sasha Ivanova delivered the story and added personal some colour to it.

The meeting was opened by mifutu.ro representative Rodrigo Sainz’ welcome speech. The project is located in Chile and aims to bring finance closer to people, reducing overall inefficiency in the sector. The speech was extremely warmly welcomed.

After that, we saw the whales: Luis Enrique Torres and Rodrigo
Seguel from IBM.. MS rocked the floor with a very inspirational presentation on the company’s implementation of blockchain in its cloud product, MS Azure. IBM had a story about HYPERLRGER and its many uses in different business applications.

Federico Kunze of Tendermint was talking about Cosmos, an Internet of Blockchains. This topic is probably the hottest one on today’s blockchain agenda as everyone is dreaming about a tool that will help doing direct transactions between Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains (the most obvious pair).

John Edmunds of Godzillion spoke on blockchain based crowdfunding. A system that would allow people to create a basket of assets/tokens, essentially buying small portions of many projects and tiny amount of tokens and hence diversifying their investment bets however small amounts they are deploying. John must have some saying in economics being a Professor with Babson College.

Keynote’s panel absolute peak was reached with a concluding presentation from Nolvia Serrano, ETHLend. Her story was very well worked, and literally a line of people formed to talk with Nolvia as she finished presenting. ETHLend is developing a lending system that allows to use ERC20 tokens as collateral for crypto loans in other currencies. Quite an instrument for funding - i.e. raising working capital - in case you operate in crypto. It also provides new opportunities for those actively trading different tokens, especially shorting and designing pair trades or arbitrage operations.

The conference had this spirit of decentralization and personal development which can be illustrated with one Q&A item:

Q: “We are traders from Venezuela, economic situation in our country is terrible. How we can handle this situation: we want to work for international cripto startups, but they all need high-skilled people, and to become hi-skilled we need to invest probably 1 year in education, but if we stop trading and start to study, we will have no money for live. What do you think can we do to break this vicious circle?”

A: “You don’t have to be a programmer to contribute to the crypto community. Many projects and companies find their employees via their blogging or twitter, so start writing and sharing your opinion. If you can come up with a good idea and share it with a project or company about how you could help them- many would listen! You have to first do some work to show you are serious, and you can do it on nights and on weekends. I worked very hard for 2 years - day and night - to build my reputation and show my determination and understanding.”

There is hope for everyone, after all. Just go for it!

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