ETHLatam origins. How it started, how it’s going. From a ~300 people hackathon to a 4,000+ people conference. Mission and values.
The Genesis: ETHBuenosAires Hackathon and Ethereum BA Meetup
ETHBuenosAires hackathon was held in Buenos Aires in 2018. It was the first ETH Global Community hackathon and the first of its kind to be held in Latin America.
The hackathon had a massive impact:
- Sponsors hired attendees and volunteers.
- Attending companies hired employees.
- Volunteers from other countries launched their own local hackathons.
From that moment on, the local community started getting together and talking about the massive opportunity to continue developing the Ethereum ecosystem across the region.
This time, as it would continue to happen, the community took ownership of the challenge: the Ethereum BA Meetup Group was created, a venue was booked, and invitations were sent. Suddenly, people were sharing and enjoying the first gathering in November 2018, kickstarting 18 months of amazing stories, friendships, and projects that would bring us all together in Buenos Aires and around the world.
2020: The lockdown
With the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in March 2020, a long and strict lockdown was implemented in Argentina, as a means of avoiding health services collapse.
Ethereum BA meetups started being online on Zoom.
Online events allowed the community to grow faster: people from different Argentinian provinces and other LatAm countries started joining the meetup. Streaming was not only beneficial for attendees but also allowed speakers from other countries to participate, such as Evan Van Ness, Justin Drake, Noah Zinsmeister, and Vitalik Buterin.
By December 2020, the lockdown took a toll on the organizers: Argentina was still in lockdown. After months of online meetings, and experimenting with different dynamics for attendees to be able to talk to each other as if it was an event IRL, we decided it was time for the grand finale.
But a great meetup couldn’t end without a great presentation. We invited Vitalik Buterin as the last edition’s main speaker. Almost 500 people joined.
2021: DeFi Latam meetups
With lockdown restrictions less strict, the DeFi Latam community started to meet in person, reuniting people from Buenos Aires and surrounding cities.
The DeFi Latam community was key to the growth of the ecosystem. Although the educational content that they shared was not exclusively about Ethereum, the community shared the same values and mission: to educate people and empower them to use blockchain tools to solve real-life problems that people in Latin America face every day.
Fast forward to 2022 and the DeFi Latam community has almost 27K followers on Twitter, 4000+ participants in its Telegram group, and almost 500 attendants to their monthly meetup. They hosted events in several cities other than Buenos Aires, such as Rosario, Cordoba, Salta and La Plata.
Ethereum BA + DeFiLatam = ETHLatam first edition
As you may know, Argentina was one of the candidates for DevCon 2020. We pushed very hard for the #DevconBA2020 campaign. We started on some Telegram groups, but conversations escalated rapidly on Twitter:
The community also shilled #DevconBA2020 in Devcon Osaka, including Mariano Conti’s talk at the main stage on day three.
Unfortunately, Buenos Aires was not chosen. But that didn’t stop us. In January 2022 some of the Ethereum BA and DeFi Latam team members joined forces and summoned another amazing and talented group of community members to build something special and bigger: ETHLatam.
Road to ETHLatam
The road to ETHLatam was hard: during 2022 the market entered a big downturn and we entered one of the heaviest crypto winters ever. Hey, the event was even announced on the same day that the market crashed. The context wasn’t good at all.
We also wanted ETH Latam to be accessible to everyone. We are here to help onboard as many people as we can, but we had 2 barriers: money and language.
Average salary in Argentina is 250 USD. Even selling 50 DAI tickets would exclude many people. So we decided to make it free so that everyone could experience it.
We also had real-time translations in both stages to overcome the language barrier, English-> Spanish, and Spanish-> English.
Fortunately, we had the support from the projects that trusted us because they knew how hard we had worked for the last 4 years: MakerDao, OpenZeppelin, Decentraland, and Ripio.
With the first sponsors confirmed, more projects joined: The Ethereum Foundation, Belo, Wink, Lemon, Think&Dev, Exactly, EPNS, Connext, Lens, Wonderland, Polygon, Auth0, Metis, ETHGlobal, Bitso, Livepeer, The Graph, Starkware, Scroll, Worldcoin, Protofire.
And last but not least, we want to give a special mention to the City of Buenos Aires government, which was also a key partner in making this event successful.
The Conference
Raising money in an unfavorable context wasn’t the only challenge we faced.
- There were 65 volunteers, all working for free in their free time.
- Our country has several currency issues - we have at least 7 dollar exchange rates-.
- The Economy Minister quit last July and inflation accelerated, making it complicated for our providers to maintain the prices (or even just provide a quote).
But, in the end, the 3 day-conference was a HUGE success. It couldn’t have been better: the community learned, had fun, we’ve met old frens and made new ones. People felt inspired by the talks of several of the most prestigious speakers from the ecosystem: Aya Miyaguchi, Director of the Ethereum Foundation; Stani Kulechov, Founder of Aave and Lens; Patricio Worthalter, Founder of POAP; Evan Van Ness, from Starbloom Ventures (and This week in Ethereum), Camila Russo, Chiefess at The Defiant; Vitalik Buterin on an online interview, and many more.
Argentinians had the opportunity to feel the building vibes of an Ethereum global event, while our friends from across the world discovered the passion and energy of the local community. During the conference, we also had a successful Quadratic Foundic voting to support Public Good projects built by locals.
You can watch all the talks on our YouTube channel.
Latam spirit
Although we are not going into the details of the branding of ETHLatam since we plan to publish a blog post about it soon, we want to dedicate some lines to talk about the inspiration.
The ETHLatam brand was inspired by traditional Andean textiles, combined with cool pixel art.
Fun fact: the designer was the same that created the ETHBuenosAires logo back in 2018 🤯
Yes sir, we’re a loyal community!
Mission and Values
Argentina plays in hard mode: As countries across the world try to cope with rising prices, there is perhaps no society in a major economy that understands how to live with inflation better than Argentineans. That’s one of the main reasons it is one of the countries with the highest crypto adoption rate in the world.
Although organizing a conference is a significant challenge, especially in the context of a bear market and [almost] literally 😅 at the end of the world, we consider this another step of a long journey.
Not only in Argentina, but in all Latam countries, the possibilities enabled by Ethereum are not an option, but THE alternative for individuals to build a new system where no one is left behind.
Today we are proud to say that in the past 4 years, we have laid a solid groundwork for a vibrant local Ethereum community. As the pioneers we assumed the responsibility to plant seeds in the fertile Latam ground so that this infinite garden continues to grow with the values of Ethereum.
That’s why now we want you to take the lead and build community in your city. We’re here to help and empower you.
Growing the Ethereum community with <3,
From Buenos Aires Latin America to the world 🚀
Special thanks
All of this was possible thanks to the energy and support of numerous people:
The organizing team of ETHLatam
Volunteers
Sponsors
Speakers
Producer agency and all the collaborators