Growing up in the rural highlands of Guatemala, a country where more than half of the population live below the poverty line and where 8 in 10 indigenous children suffer from chronic malnutrition - poverty alleviation has always been at the forefront of my personal vindication.
See, it’s not that Guatemala is a ‘poor’ country per se, in fact, it is the richest country by GDP in Central America. The true challenge of our country is inequality - Guatemala is a country where just 260 Guatemalans own 56% of the wealth… This means that 0.001% of the population owns more than half of the country’s wealth (talk about the 1%)!
The question is - what is the driver of this inequality? Ultimately, the question comes down to land tenure. The largest 2.5% of landholders in our country occupy nearly two-thirds of the agricultural land. As a consequence, those who live on the lower rungs of society are unable to grow their own crops to ensure food security, or build their own dignified homes, among a plethora of issues. It is a self-perpetuating system, whereby those who have the least opportunity to access land, are also those whose education, health, and wellbeing is put aside by those who hold the power to do anything about the matter.
As such, I’ve been captivated by the promises of blockchain technology to create more transparent and equitable economies - particularly across global societies that, like Guatemala, are plagued with incessant inequality. I’ve been especially drawn towards figuring out how web3 can usher in new ways of disrupting land ownership to ultimately address and overcome land inequality at a global scale.
Enter CityDAO… Back in July, I came across what was then, a small but committed group of internet strangers who were driven by leveraging the power of DAO’s to figure out how we could all work together to bring land rights and governance to the cutting edge of innovations in the web3 space. Led by conviction and the belief that CityDAO was at the helm of a truly exciting development, the team has since been tirelessly at work to bring this brilliant project to light.
Fast forward 5 months, and it’s incredible to see the exponential growth CityDAO has gone through. Selling 10,000 NFT’s, the purchase of Parcel 0, raising over 1,800 ETH, Vitalik’s shoutout, rockstar crypto folks joining the community, among so many other achievements - I am confident that CityDAO is heading towards not just tokenizing land; but rather, towards creating fairer, more sustainable, and transparent places for us to live and create.
CityDAO’s journey towards making real assets governable, accessible, and interoperable through the power of blockchain technology has the opportunity to radically shift the way we interact with the concept of ownership. Coming from a country where asset ownership is highly stratified, I am incredibly excited by CityDAO’s efforts towards creating much fairer financial systems.
It has truly been an honour to see CityDAO continue to flourish, and I sincerely hope to continue to see CityDAO’s growth to reach those areas where its efforts are most needed.
WAGMI, for real. 🤝