[REDACTED] 2024 | Crecimiento: Argentina as the First Crypto Native Economy

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   your community super excited to be here chatting with you I'm going to talk about cresimo NLF and pay attention to the slides not to me because I'm going to move very fast through a lot of information I'm going to hack your visual cortex to process a lot of information so uh a little bit about me I've worked on a lot of things over the last 20 years uh a lot of tech a lot of startups movements crypto protocols and so on and most recently I'm very

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   involved in helping bootstrap the first Crypt native nation states Argentina started the 20th century on top of the world it was one of the top 10 countries by GDP but economic mismanagement ruined the country recently there's been massive inflation over the last 10 20 years it's seen somewhere between 50 and 200% inflation per year which is insane you basically cannot save any money but today there's an opportunity to fix the

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   economy and drive massive prosperity in Argentina and that opportunity is Cento so I'm going to talk to you about broadly how economic Prosperity happens through technology I'm going to talk about AR Ina's concrete opportunity I'll tell you about creso the movement and then about a left the pop-up City that we ran in August and I'll finish by talking about what's next for cimento and a special invitation to the near

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   Community Technology is the strongest driver of human progress when you see uh the The Human Condition over the last few hundred years there's been steady Improvement through the development of science and technology today technology companies increasingly Drive most of the economic value around the planet and this is only increasing even if some sector is not directly about technology technology underlies the economic nature

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   of that sector today technology companies can thankfully built anywhere in the world the internet has done enormous um service to the World by democratizing access to information democratizing access to software and enabling Founders and Builders around the world to build the future so today Tech startup ecosystems are no longer just in Silicon Valley in places like that they're all over the world but unfortunately the conditions in various

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   places are not good enough those Tech startups though they can be started everywhere they tend to centralize in specific uh countries if you think about the the conditions of that economy when it comes to startups lots of different features about each of the stages of what we call the Builder funnel vary across different countries in the US which arguably has the best startup uh not arguably

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   definitively has the best startup culture in the entire planet has to start somewhere on the order of 10 million startups to get to a 100 Tech Giants so there's incredibly low conversion rates across the different stages of the Builder funnel and you can rate and grade various different nations around the world in terms of how high quality each of the stages are so if your nation doesn't have high quality stages you can bet that most of the

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   startups that get developed there will end up having to move to another economy now startups can achieve product Market fit in somewhere between 1 to 4 years sometimes it takes longer but on average it's very easy within 1 to two years to see if some business model will work but startups require somewhere somewhere between 5 and 15 years to grow and develop that into a strong business so startups need good economic environment with longevity many of of these

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   particular countries do not have such a long long-term um good conditions you you have to think about tech companies in an evolutionary landscape where there's tons of tech companies emerging and over time they either thrive in good conditions or end up having to move to other places so companies flow from worse economies down through grading descent into better economies so as a nation state you don't just have to do

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    better and improve your conditions you have to look at the best possible top tier environment and emulate that today that's happened across a set of financial centers around the world this is why Seoul Singapore Dubai and a number of other places are incredible environments for startups it started not by just improving conditions but by looking at the top tier best possible conditions and establishing that

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    today crypto is software eating law and finance and can enable building better economies around the world with crypto Primitives you can build entire economic infrastructure for a nation state using crypto Primitives you can borrow from the best possible environments design an economic an economy in a box and install it in a particular location now let's talk about Argentina's opportunity Argentina can

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    become a top 15 or top 10 economy in 3 to six years if it deeply invests in its technology development today there's massive frictions in the economy there's in terrible inflation and unstable monetary policy argentines tend to have to exit the economy to hold value there's lacking basic infrastructure like loans credit mortgages and so on there's tremendous friction in doing business it has one of the a pretty low score in

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    terms of the ease of doing business there's no good business capital for investing in startups almost no um in Angel investment culture almost no VC funds and any kind of startup that that starts or begins starting in Argentina end up ends up having to move away most of the Argentine finers that that I know end up having to build their companies in uguay in the US or somewhere else in

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    the world and today there's basically a huge legal vacuum for for technology infrastructure there's a lot of interest in Argentina to bring and attract various Industries but there's there's no good structures for supporting that kind of innovation now when you think about all of these particular frictions you can immediately think of concrete crypto Primitives to build infrastructure Financial infrastructure for startups in an environment using

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    crypto tools loans and mortgages you can think of the defi loan markets the ability to hold uh units of account that hold economic value swap through dexas to specific stable coins worried about different kinds of monetary policy and and you build a currency that has much tighter controls and prevents certain kinds of printing so in order to greatly upgrade the argentinan economy all we need to do is

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    is build specific products and specific services that can be used by millions of people in the economy uh to solve those particular problems so from my perspective we just need somewhere between 10 or 20 successful startups solving these individual frictions and we can Vault the entire Argentina economy to being a top tier uh International Financial Center crypto is the opportunity you cannot quite do that with like the standard legal structures

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    Argentina needs to Leap Frog uh the rest of the world so Argentina today has tremend mendous Tech Talent there's lots of startups being built uh but most of them have to move now recently argentine's fed up with inflation elected mle who has been coming in to deregulate the infrastructure um deregulate how arent the argentinan economy Works prevent the the massive print and put Argentina on a trajectory

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    for Success argentines around the country fed up with economics and Mis management want to change and so this is the beginning of a great opportunity there's massive bottom up crypto adoption fueled by that inflation and now tremendous stop down support and this creates the perfect opportunity where the crypto Community can seize the moment and create the first national economy on crypto rails so that's the opportunity for

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    cimento this is the movement it was born to catalyze this opportunity and try to cause it in the next two years let's leverage the fact that now there's 4 to8 million people in Argentina using crypto every day and there's open top down support to build that those missing Financial rails and upgrade the economy let's support the build out of those 10 or 20 successful startups whether they're new startups or

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    attracting existing companies elsewhere to focus on the Argentina market so this means bringing 5 to 10 million more people on chain improving the startup ecosystem and giving eventually giving startups a 20-year stability framework it's a pretty aggressive plan we want to do this over two years and in order to do that we're going to need uh in order to get 20 successful startup we're going to need hundreds of startups to be built so this is an open call and call to action to anybody that wants to build a

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    first crypto native nation state to come and build the missing uh products and missing services to bootstrap and upgrade the financial infrastructure of Argentina and give a tremendous benefit to 46 million people from there we can export that same technology to a lot of other countries around around the world so this sounds like a pretty uh large scale ambitious plan the way we're starting is by we first decided to host

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    a pop-up City I'll tell you about that in a moment and we're going to leverage that the success from there to support a a large startup ecosystem and eventually build the long-term support structures so already in that so this started a few months ago and already there's 68 startups ranging from precc to series a a range of these already have millions of users that's been growing extremely quickly uh and we attracted a number of startups from around the world to focus

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    in Argentina as a market uh we catalyze this movement bringing together a whole bunch of different crypto ecosystems to support and that this drent movement and focus on Argentina as a market so the popup city was this great experiment in bringing together thousands of people 2,000 people around this idea the this moment of bootstrapping the entire Argentine economy and making Crypton native and we brought them together for a whole month around

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    Alf Alf convened a whole set of participants from um crypto leaders to builders to aspiring Founders to Regulators to um government officials and we had an extremely high energy month of talking about this opportunity and supporting the new Builders and Founders there and so I'll give you a view into some of the things that we did so though we started with a goal of a few hundred people it grew very quickly in thousands there were hundreds of events and we ended up building a whole

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    bunch of infrastructure for the city so we unboarded um a whole bunch of merchants around the The Hub who went from being uh exposed to the terrible situation of inflation to then being paid the same day and swapping directly into stable coins or trading it indexes um around the world and so that was transformative for tons of people who suddenly had a a dramatic change to to their business Argentina hasn't you kind of have to come to see it it has an enormous amount of demand for these kinds of financial products and so this

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    is an exactly the exact place where tons of crypto companies out there can find great product Market fit we structured the city around a hub we found an amazing uh building to be able to be the the focal Center of of the city um this is a hub that now has uh people like it so much that it has now become a permanent uh co-work environment uh and here is where a number of startups were

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    born uh and a number of them are are working out of there right now and it will be a hub where we bring back the community in future events the B City had a whole range of tracks focus on learning about specific Fields um to uh softer things like how do you build a right culture in a startup how do you grow as a leader and so on so we wanted to be be able to support Founders and builders in the Journey of building the difficult thing that our startups and we

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    brought and to do that we brought together a whole slew of of experts from around the world so these are like some snapshots of the groups and ecosystems involved and we ended up issuing um passports to on chain uh for the citizens of the city we also ended up uh one of the teams dropped a stable coin around the peso to be able to uh pay for food and that ended up being a huge unlock for the merchants as well because they could go immediately from that

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    stable coin get paid right away instead of waiting 60 to 90 days for um credit card transactions and then swap out to whatever currency of their choice um this ended up being so successful that the mayor of the city now wants to use it for uh dropping um bus tickets to uh various groups and so on we ended up having a range of high-profile visits from uh uh government from Regulators hu huge amount of media attention so overall

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    this was like a huge um success so the city kicked off a a tremendous uh opportunity for the whole um the whole nation so um we had a a a a pretty great start to the movement and now what's coming next is we need to do this again um bring an even larger uh community in December and then do this in multiple times in 2025 so like I me the rough metrics of the movement are stand like this today so again this movement did not exist a few months ago it's just been a few

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    months of of build up from scratch there are now around 7,000 community members 68 startups hundreds of Builders working on this we had a large hackathon um around that many citizens and several of start startups now have around 6 million users so what's next uh this is a super aggressive super ambitious plan and in order to succeed we're going to have to support a lot of the founders and developers with the tools they need to build their products and scale them as quickly as we possibly can so we're we're structuring a range of

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    accelerators to go back to back the first one starts in November so if you're an aspiring founder that has a startup and need need an accelerator come join us in in um in December uh there'll be a bunch of them during 2025 and we also found the need for a Founder School uh to help a lot of aspiring Founders that don't yet know how to build a company aren't quite yet ready for an accelerator to learn a lot of of the relevant knowledge and materials as fast as possible to be able

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    to uh to get going again this is if we can do this by 2026 um because mle's window is you know very short uh who knows what's going to happen in the next election we just have this two to threee time scale to reach this level of success if we can do this if by 2026 we can have you know another four to five million people on chain and start unlocking massive prosperity for argentinians we can then lock in a crypto Financial infrastructure for the

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    entire economy and upgrade a country that has had such a Troublesome history with its economy into codes law type rules that prevent mismanagement so in order to do there's a whole range of programs required to do this a lot of participants around the community are building all kinds of things across the Builder funnel and we're also one one of the really cool ideas that came out of the movement is to build the first Unchained City so what we're what a set of us are going to do is we're going to actually constru

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    con a digital City and embedded with concrete legal structure um and then eventually end up with a a um an economic zone associated with the digital City and use that as a center of business for the uh cimo movement this we think is a a huge unlock for crypto generally but especially for nation states that want to go from their current economic conditions to leveraging the best possible conditions

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    around the world uh there's all kinds of things that that we're planning so um the last thing I want to highlight is that a the the range of opportunity available and the and a huge call to action so one one of these pieces is that I am here to invite the entire near Community to come to Argentina and join us there in uh 2025 so bring uh redacted there uh we're trying to get as much uh

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    of the crypto ecosystems around the world to focus in Argentina for 2025 and grow the community there and second a huge invitation to this community to join Us in December come down to left come down to the next um popup city which will be in the middle of December uh and if you're interested in that we have CES today on Monday uh and come find it uh you can join the telegram group here uh and get info about uh

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    where it is so thank you very much uh this I hope that you can join me in upgrading the infrastructure of Argentina and if we can do that well we can then export that structure to all of Latin America and eventually the rest of the world thank you very much