Giga: Staking for school connectivity by Gerben Kijne | Devcon SEA

[Music] hello everybody can uh can you guys hear me well good um thanks to the organizers for putting me right after Chris it saves me a lot of introduction for what Giga is and does uh quick summary so we're a project about connecting every school in the world to the internet and every young person to uh information opportunity and choice um a little bit of a summary of what we've uh what we've achieved so far um we've connected about 14 and a half thousand schools benefiting almost 8 million students and we're currently active in 34 countries uh so it's a big big operation one of the um one of the opportunities that we found one of the challenges that we have is in uh once the schools connected to fund the operational expenses of this school so we're kind of looking for a sustainable financing model and one of the projects that we've looked into uh is around staking so I thought it'd be interesting to talk to a crowd that's very familiar with staking and talk a little bit about the challenges that we faced in implementing this in the real world so um what we want to do is we want to create uh staking nodes uh and use staking rewards to pay for the operational expenses of uh of internet connectivity so it's kind of like an endowment um a little bit about the size of the opportunity or challenge that we have uh we did a case study a few years ago where we looked at uh what it would cost to connect the 86,000 schools in the 17 countries that we were active in at the time and uh we discovered that it would cost approximately $35 million in operational expenses so it's a very significant problem that we're looking to solve for um but the benefits also speak for themselves so with sustainable funding about 25 and a half million students and teachers will be able to benefit from connectivity uh what we've done so far is uh we started with setting up a staking node and uh loading it up with 32 e so the you can look at the the validator note there but uh and what we are using this funding for is to pay for connectivity for one particular School uh in the Mur the mama Primary School in uh in Rwanda so about thousand uh students in Rwanda are B benefiting from this uh this connectivity at the moment but uh we ran into into some problems so um currently we have to jump through all kinds of regulatory Hoops in uh making this uh uh connectiv making this system work so we have to offramp the eth into Fiat then the ISP needs to send like a paper invoice to a company that like pays this invoice and then the the school needs to be connected so you kind of lose track of the um um of the payment process in that way and it's something that we feel uh hinders the scalability of this a lot so there's no problem in sort of paying for one taking note ourselves and connecting one school but doing this for uh all the remaining schools becomes a problem for impact investors if you can't prove the impact so this is where we are um we have uh completed this pilot uh and we want to scale but we're currently sort of Stuck in the Middle where we're trying to set ourselves up for Success uh one of the things that we need to do for that is create an endtoend crypto flow uh in the cooperation with the Central Bank of Rwanda and we have a pathway for doing that and the second is to set up a pulled impact staking product um but I'm here today with a a super specific call to action and Vivian I might like ask you where that group of uh African Community uh was was gathered uh but we're essentially looking today for a crypto company based in Rwanda to could uh who could join us uh in this regulatory sandbox of the Central Bank uh and help us uh make this more scalable going forward I'll leave a few minutes for questions thank you do we have anyone from Ronda here may not here nobody it's okay we have the the whole Hub okay we have one person here one I think over there let's start with this uh gentleman with the white shirt yes uh I've got a crypto company in Rwanda I'll talk to you after oh good good I told you it will work so I'm from yamar and we are having all kinds of Crisis so is there can you speak up a little yeah so I'm from Myanmar and in Myanmar there are a lot of Civil Wars going on and we the the schools needs a lot of this internet connected issue so the first uh challenge is that not only the internet connectivity but also we only get around 6 hours 7 hours elected City here so in that kind of scenario uh will the Giger you infrastructure will be walk or that's the first question and second is will there be you know future plan to come to mmer to support this kinds of you know internet infrastructure development yeah so this particular project was really about like uh raising the money for to pay for operational expenses there's of course this whole infrastructure question and electricity providing question that also needs to be solved for uh which is part of a bigger problem I suppose um we do intend to uh see if this uh solution will scale on a global level uh so far we've always hit this like regulatory glass ceiling uh in this uh in in in this solution so uh we are quite excited to be working with the Central Bank in Rwanda in trying to break that glass ceiling for this particular use case and then hopefully using that as a um um uh a pilot study to show central banks that there's an opportunity in this space in in other countries as well okay but I think uh for the Rand they already have you know support of the central bank but in myar the central bank and all kinds of financial transactions are always you know checked by this dictor military so I think this will be not happen in like uh next a few years I believe yeah myamar sounds like a very complicated situation I agree with that thanks for raising the question any other question we have time for one last question one over there so um I'm from Kenya um and and I really appreciate the work um that you are doing with um with Chris so my question would be in terms of um locating for example the institutions um he had mentioned that you have an an ml model that helps you identify um what is a school and what is not a school is that model available for use uh to other use cases so um I work in agriculture um identity for Farmers uh I mean the answer the answer is yes it probably have to be a different model uh but we do have a data team that looks into that and I don't know if you mentioned it did you mention that we're also doing Hospital schools and health centers where am I spoiling something yeah so we're also branching out into other uh public infrastructure like hospitals and health centers yeah okay um I look for you afterwards thank you and thank you gin thank you Giga team that was a lovely half an hour okay that's another round of applause