Decentralizing economic opportunity: Communities using crypto & decentralized protoc... | Devcon SEA

[Music] hello everyone Hi everyone stick around because that was really the perfect introduction for our talk in a wider framing for how decentralized currencies are actually being put to work in different emerging economies um I'm really excited to talk to you about how we're using the free permissionless distribution of money to really impact people on the ground in Last Mile communities that are currently underserved by traditional Financial systems uh I am here as the executive director of a project called good dollar good dollar is a universal basic income protocol whose mission is actually to enable anyone with access to a smartphone with a cell phone to be able to access decentralized currencies and actually onboard into crypto we do this through Distributing a digital Universal basic income every day and that's helped us onboard nearly a million people I am thrilled to be joined here today with JN B jorg who is the director of Grassroots economics which is I would say probably one of the leading projects if not the leading projects that's actually innovating with decentralized currencies and really breaking the Monopoly on money in terms of helping communities to create more credit more Commerce bottom up through using decentralized tooling and it's a great example of ethereum in the real world uh I will say that I've been building in this space for a long time and it makes me very excited to see the talk that came before if you will that really shows that this progress is happening at scale and John B is I'd say the zoom in the double click in as to the framing that we just saw so some of you guys might have seen crypto is useless um some of you guys might have seen this Tok to yesterday or seen some people walking around with a crypto is useless hat and the idea here is actually a very clever campaign out of cell which is that crypto is useless unless you've had a real need to use it and The Meta framing for all of this is that there are still 1.7 billion people around the world who are living in countries where inflation out paches wages if the past few years have been any indication that's going to continue to increase there are 1.4 billion adults around the world that remain unbanked that means people who have no access to any of the financial services that yosf just mentioned in terms of savings pay payments credit Etc uh most of this 1.4 billion people have access to a very magic computer that they carry around in their phones which is a smartphone and that's what enables them to access the same ethereum virtual machine that we all use as and so there's the 6.17 million crypto owners today represents a big gap to close in terms of where crypto still has its biggest potential to make a real impact on the financial lives of billions around the world vope we're here to talk about decentralized Economic Opportunity so what are some of the principles that we're looking at uh the first is permissionless access so how are we actually removing Gatekeepers uh crypto is the most obvious example of that anyone can sign up for a web 3 wallet anyone can send or receive currency it is this permissionless that actually enables local gra local empowerment to happen uh bottom up where communities are able B to grow in their own Super Cycle if you will and ultimately this is designed to drive resiliency and adaptability for economies that uh where it doesn't really make sense that the global macroeconomic shocks of say the US presidential election have such a big effect on Last Mile Farmers or communities all around the world and so this is designed to actually increase resilience so that there's less of a single point of failure for individuals and communities the reality is is that still today it's places where capital is needed the most that capital is the most expensive this comes as no surprise to anyone here from The Real World ethereum track but in Nigeria just for context for a 100 to $1,000 loan you're looking at an annualized interest rate from anywhere from 30 to 50% right so if you're actually looking to start a small business it means that money is at more expensive for you than it is for many of us from the United States or from Europe and the user experience has also kept um crypto adoption from happening for a number of reasons right so up until very very recently it's been very hard to access web 3 in terms of sign the sign up process for a wallet certainly if you're don't have access to a bank account it's not that simple to go online and buy a $100 of Bitcoin on some on binance all of this results in there being a very high cost of experimentation for individuals and this is what creates this narrative around crypto being useless right is that uh it without with all these challenges facing the space it's hard to build products that seem like they're of real use however in 2024 we're facing a new reality where not all of our problems have been solved but certainly the potential exists to make a massive change we see that there are a number of Simple Mobile native Solutions there are over a 100 million stable coin holders around the world this has probably been seen as the one of the key uh killer use cases of crypto today and this is creates the preconditions for us to really begin to build for real communities and real needs all of this is critical because everything happening on chain everything happening transparently actually improves our odds for financial access because it enables individuals and communities to really build credit history in a transparent way as we just discussed it's actually lower middle inome countries that are driving crypto adoption today so India Nigeria Indonesia are the fastest growing crypto markets and 15 of the 20 fastest growing markets come from lowincome countries and unsurprisingly its decentralized systems and currencies that are leading the way this is most likely because of LeapFrog Innovation which was referenced before where when there's no pre-existing technology to overcome people just NE jump directly to the Next Generation and so Grassroots economics which has been building in this space for a long time I consider one of the flagship LeapFrog Innovations in the space because they're innovating both on the payment rails and fintech level but most importantly on the currency and the monetary level in terms of and really breaking the Monopoly on money and how communities can create create their own value create their own creditworthiness and actually expand the amount of economic activity that they're doing within the community this is a this is where crypto has its biggest potential and it's my true pleasure to introduce jbi Jorge who has been building this and implementing this on the ground for for actually nearly 100 communities and she's flown here today to tell us from Kenya to tell us about her work work and some of the impact that it's had on their communities thank you Anna yeah my name is jambin jog I have been working for grass economics foundation for the last six years and I'm really happy to be here I am an advocate for Community inclusion currencies for poverty education and sustainable development so how do we heal a postcolonial legacy of ton communities and ecosystem how do we enable communities to create scale and scale credit how does this enable wealth Creations to stay within the communities this commitment pulling we've been working on um commitment pulling which is an economic protocol inspired by indigenous wisdom so when I talk about indigenous wisdom I I mean rotation of Labor Association I come from the Kiku community in Kenya and we call it muia we have so many communities in Kenya with very different names for this um um indigenous uh practice and it's not just in Kenya it's even Global um what you're looking at the pictures here the first one is a type of a uh rotation of Labor an educational kind of it uh that is a service muia women grinding uh maze for FL that is an infrastructural kind of M there's so many okay um so um this is the difference of what was and what is now so what was the share economic Commons you know the we had synergetic commitments harmonious flows accountable systems you know ecosystem regeneration Democratic stewards unlik what we have now you know the fat dominance open markets ITC now in communities right now they have these six assets for them to understand they have the six assets and to understand at what level these assets are is very important and that is what you're doing with communities now and what this this uh image here is them realizing that they have it like I have what you don't have and you can benefit from one another creating that well is really visualizing what they can and what they have um to offer one another now I was talking about rotation of Labor associations so this is all about making commitments fulfilling commitments and accepting commitments so just to explain rotation of Labor in a bit this is family one Family 2 and family three they all the families have needs you know they they need a house built they need a farm fixed you know so what they do they create commitments backed by um they create um commitments and then they say okay fine I'm committing I will come and help build a house for family one I'm also committing that I will also help family two build a house and eventually um they pull their commitments together okay so those are pool's commitments so that means I when I make commitments I will accept commitments and I will also fulfill commitments so when they all fulfill commitments they are allowing accountability and exchange um and they they have a clear and known agreed upon rules okay so um So eventually when they do a cycle of helping one another you know doing the commit giving commitments accepting commitments and fulfilling commitments there a a range of physical um assets grown social assets grown human spiritual political and natural assets you know they change now grassroot economics Foundation has been helping formalize these commitments uh by adding technology and now it becomes easier for me to Value what I'm offering um in a community H it's easier because they have an unique signature H there is an expiration date uh you can you can decide to have a demor or not but a demor is very important to help with the circulation of the vouchers and then it also means that whoever accepts um that voucher has the right to redeem it from the issuer okay now making commitments and fulfilling commitments and accepting commitments is Paramount and this is what used to happen and it's now um what you're advocating for but trust is very important this is how trust was grown then this is a nice illustration we do a lot of games and practical when you go when you're training communities and this is how they understand the current Reality by understanding the six asset and at what level is which asset and when they do this they're able to come up with a vision and know how each person um who each action step um will be worked on according to the rotation of Labor associations now this is production financing um this is also a very important um protocol that you um borrowed from um our forefathers um it only means that um when the Comm community members create vouchers they put them into the pool um and when a financial wants to get some of the products that are backed by these vouchers they will need to put in money into the pool and pull out of vouchers I'm going to give a good example of a a financial who pre-ordered coconuts from farmers in kify so what they did they put in money into the pool and took the vouchers backed by the Coconuts coconuts Take 5 to seven years to grow so that means when so the financial had um had the you know had the money before prior and the vouchers prior and the community members got the money before so that means they were able to sort out issues uh fees you know better farming methods better tools so we just basically uh bringing a nice socioeconomic uh uh uh process you know that is um about bringing together a nice um blend of you know changing the traditional demand and Supply models and you know tokenize um tokenization now this is what the communities in Kenya are doing they're using the ussd and they're also there the also the web interface um so this is mostly the web interface is mostly for those who do not have um smartphones um uh phones so they can create their own paper wallet and they can use one phone now we have so far seen over 65,000 households using vouchers in Kenya today we have 4 million plus um worth of transactions USD worth and 5x average um multiply effect so pulled commitments enable us to scale into the future the um to our beautiful shared Heritage thank you [Applause] thing and so um this came up in the talk right before but it's actually how do we use these systems rather to create new trust but actually to unlock trust that actually already exists on the ground and this is what I've admired the work that Grassroots and Jambi have been doing for so many years now is actually looking bottom up from the community infrastructure and developing tooling that actually enables those communities to unlock and assess value in new ways excitingly uh this is one example of I believe thousands if not hundreds of thousands that are happening around the world in terms of communities that are beginning to build circular economies um using decentralized currencies that actually enable people to create their own value this is a circular economy image from a community in Brazil that has hundreds of women that actually operate using uh the good dollar token as a community store to buy and sell Services we also have uh great examples of different entrepreneurs around the world who are using to centralized currencies bottom up to create airtime shops enabling people to use crypto to swap into Mobile minutes into airtime swap airtime value which actually is a basic need for anyone living in the Contemporary world and I think really critically the reason why this is relevant and relevant now is because now we start to comp compose the full stack that actually enables this to become practical and possible and it involves more than just technology right and so what we see is that building the stock bottom up from the technical aay what makes it actually useful for real people for the hundreds of people that Jambi and Grassroots have touched is actually the social element the community and education element that actually brings people along and customizes these Technologies for their needs so to bring it back crypto is useful but it's most useful in an ecosystem that has all of the different components of the stack that make it useful and so this suit that I'm wearing is not just for fun it is fun though uh it's to represent the idea of an ecosystem and the value of an ecosystem and that actually being the critical enabling Lynch pin to uh making the real world ethereum useful and I think everyone at Devcon who's made such an expert effort to come here to actually contribute to this ecosystem understands that and the more localized ecosystems that we develop the more we will see this come true uh so yes this is crypto today real world ethereum is decentralizing Economic Opportunity and I think we need to stay passionate and stay focused because this is still the biggest upgrade to money since it went digital we see desent centralized economy is actually upgrading the money itself and it enables money to flow back to the parts of the economy that are otherwise deemed unprofitable or non-profitable and this is what Grassroots and other projects are doing it actually enables the real wealth to come back into Community because in you know many communities around the world the people are there the resources are there the desire to collaborate is there but what's actually missing is money and so if we can actually innovate on the money itself through using the right tooling then we are able to support the decentralization of Economic Opportunity that we want to see happen uh thank you very much for listening and thank you to the ethereum foundation for making this possible all right awesome guys so again Q&A session we have to Q code on a screen scan it and send a question to the screen so we can see what you have burning question here all right guys let's see I think people just wait a little bit people are still scanning I think we have about a few minute while we waiting for them to send the question anything you want to say it at on a little bit yeah just yeah yeah um there's something else I wanted to add like um for the the pulling you know the E the production financing uh page um when you put in money people I community members can now withdraw that you know or framp that via valora um minip to through kotani uh one ram fun Bank into Kenya Shillings so it's really been amazing and I would also want to thank ethereum foundation for making sure that um I got here thanks all right you have a question all right do you might pass the the mic one second oh here's the question but but let's uh hear from the lady first okay okay go ahead thanks for calling me lady I'm not sure I identify that way but sure um it's okay uh so je this is a question for you what are the biggest barriers that are still faced because you've obviously had to overcome quite a few to get the technology in place to support these existing traditional systems what are what are the barriers that still exist if any in utilizing technology in this way yeah so one of the major barriers that you've had to to you know we still even experience right now is the network connectivity in some of the rural areas so they when they are trying to sort of um exchange into the swap um yeah so network connectivity in some areas really is a challenge and we we normally sometimes have to force them to go to the the nearest cyber cafe or you know the nearest school cuz we assuming that is where they would get like Network so movement challenges and yeah I'll would say that is like one of the major and and really smartphones phones in some rural areas so we've had to like even give a group like one phone where they need to like log out log in using their paper wallets MH sure right we have three question on the screen anything you want to answer first so um the first one how do we quantify impact so now um when I was talking about production financing so what we do we borrow this from um the past okay so in community members in communities there were leaders in each Community like Village Elders they would sit and decide the next um rotation of Labor um activities so now we don't have staff at grass like salaried staff so what we do we work with um sewards and sewards are members of the community so they are the ones that handhold the community members so whenever the communities are meeting for rotation of Labor whatever it is that they do is it building houses is it building roads or teing Farms so they send that as a report so what we do we put in soda into the pool get their vouchers so the vouchers in this case are is backed by their commitments or their M services so when the report is in then we pay them back using the voucher so really the the trades um on the saraf network uh platform um you know represents the reports that they've sent so districts in in the eastern part of Kenya equals to 10 houses 5 Etc all right that's awesome uh let's go to the next one I think you have like three minute two two question more yeah yeah no no you you take your time I'm gonna address the first two in one answer so how do you actually deal with onboarding I'm going to speak now from we gave money away um from the perspective of good dollar Ubi or free money has actually proved to be an incredibly effective onboarding method uh in terms of bringing people into web 3 and I think what's important about that is that we see that that onboarding mechanism then translates into people exploring a deeper Financial life on chain um and so obviously a good ux simple onboarding experience uh but actually making you know assets free and accessible and encouraging people to experiment has been critical to onboarding people retaining people and encouraging their ability and desire to experiment um there was one other question but I forgot oh is about creating trust between how can trust between local communities in emerging countries and a global crypto EOS system can uh be unlocked so I think in in my experience a lot of this is actually happening on the local on the community level right so it's through local community leaders that create the relevant education and and context for the individuals that come along and or the individuals that are also members of that community and as Builders it's about having the relevant on and off ramps and the relevant tools that are spefic specific to that particular country and Country context so I think that has actually proven to be on and off ramps which come up all the time and the wallet experience are the really critical bridges in the actual user experience when it goes from you know someone using a very specific Local app or currency such as Grassroots versus the cash out experience AKA Fiat in my pocket Mobile minutes on my phone uh ethereum in my wallet all right anything three obvious question you want to answer we have like one more minute if you want to yeah um how do we deal with failures of trust within a group like for our experience as gradate economists we work with already existing groups that have their own Constitution and they know how they deal with some of these challenges so what what you're doing is just adding technology to a practice that they already know that has already been there so most of the times the groups you know follow what they normally do even without like amongst the Comm is it going to the chief is it going to the Village Elder how do we sit down and um um sort that out so mostly it's within the groups want to do one more if you have a a short one we have a 30 second we can do it if you want to how can protected yeah yeah go ahead sure um how can initiatives be protected from Bots it's a great question uh certainly when you're giving free money away it's something that you have to confront and deal with decentralized identity isn't or decentralized secure unique identity is not a new problem and there's multiple ways to skin the cat I'd say actually what makes me the most excited now is like new solutions that are based off of existing community and trust that uh actually enable members of groups to verify one another and verify the unique identity of one another and I think this is a space that many builders in ethereum have been tackling for many years and we're about to see a next generation of solutions that are actually much more usable for individuals to verify one another and I think that's how Bots will be dealt with moving forward uh