Privacy, Institutions and Real-World Adoption: Exploring Devconnect in Buenos Aires
Paying for a coffee or a dinner or splitting a bill with friends is usually a pain with crypto. Payments don't go through, or they take forever, or it's hard to tell, or just a few shops accept it. But at Devconnect in Buenos Aires, real-world crypto payments arrived, and it was magical 🪄
Peanut, a bright pink app with a smiling spinning peanut, not only made paying for things fun, it also made it much cheaper than using a credit card (which adds 7%+ to transactions), converting payments at the current exchange rate instead.
Because the app was integrated with the Mercado Pago system already used in Argentina, all shops accepted it, and payments were processed in seconds. You simply scanned the QR and seconds later your payment was complete! Peanut uses Blockscout as its explorer for viewing incoming transactions, providing open and transparent tracking for the payment platform.
It truly was real-world adoption in action, and showed that crypto can become more and more integrated into our daily financial lives, as it already is for many in Buenos Aires.
Blockscout in BA
We had a small team on the ground in Buenos Aires to meet with partners and friends and make new connections. The city was incredibly welcoming and the venue included different zones where privacy, gaming, social, DeFi and more mingled amongst each other.
There were several large stages for talks, a music area, coworking, power-up stations, and plenty of space and breakout areas for deeper conversations.
Of course there were also a ton of side events each day, and we found ourselves traveling to various parts of town for some amazing ones including a Padel tournament hosted by Zircuit, Uniswap house, Multichain Day, Arbiverse, DIA Infra Gardens, WalletCon and more. These venues featured workshops, talks and networking with like-minded projects bringing privacy, utility and adoption to crypto.
We also had the opportunity to present at the Onchain Capital Summit hosted by Mellow. This event brought together luminaries from institutions, exchanges, privacy protocols, exchanges, DeFi, and the Ethereum Foundation to discuss the next wave of institutional adoption.
It's going to take cooperation and creativity from all sides, but the panel talks showed that institutions are coming to the table and the greater Ethereum community is ready to welcome institutions with smart compliance and regulatory frameworks.
We had a chance to connect with a lot of our friends (though not nearly all, if we missed you let's get together at the next one!) and meet some exciting new projects in the ecosystem. All in all it was a great conference which showcased Ethereum's innovation and growing influence around the world.
Key Takeaways
From the meetings and talks we saw some definitive trends for the upcoming year. These align well with our current product direction as we think about compliance and private explorer features.
- Privacy - Privacy has finally become a primary focus. In order to onboard institutions, privacy for their clients and financial transactions is required, driving some of this initiative. There was a featured keynote with Vitalik and Roger Dingledine, co-founder of the Tor Project, the announcement of the Kohaku wallet from Ethereum, and an entire privacy track devoted to bringing privacy and private payments onchain.
- Institutional Adoption - There were numerous institutions at the conference including Latam banks that are already using blockchain. There were talks on tokenization of real-world assets and the need for additional regulatory clarity for different types of jurisdictions. At the Onchain Capital Summit, attendees included a true mix of established institutions, leaders from FinTech, and onchain companies and looking to onboard the global financial ecosystem.
- Ethereum Foundation - The Ethereum Foundation took a starring role at the conference. They had representatives at every side event, participated in panels, and held important workshops including the trillion dollar security initiative which we attended all day Saturday. At this event projects from across the space worked in groups to understand the problems and start working on solutions facing security from different vantage points (infra, L1 & L2, interop, onchain, offchain, wallets and more). It was obvious the EF has undergone a big upgrade (including adding our founder Igor Barinov to lead the privacy initiative!) and taking steps to vastly increase adoption.
- Real-world adoption - speaking of adoption, it was evident everywhere. From the Peanut app, to the many talks on the history of crypto in Argentina (where blockchain became a key survival mechanism in the face of high inflation), blockchain is not theoretical in Buenos Aires but woven into the fabric of everyday life. It was an exciting glimpse into a future where the financial world runs on crypto rails.
