Sign New York Banking Agreement Fast

Industry sign banking new york agreement fast

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to reimagine 2020 the virtual blockchain conference series i'm your co-host ashley meredith head of education over at mouseville blockchain accelerator and today we're bringing you version 7.0 the history of coins and i'm excited to be joined by edgar fernandez he's the founder of eos costa rica hi edgar how are you doing today i'm great thank you so much for having us on uh ashley it's great to be here yeah thanks for being here uh so before we really dive in into everything that eos costa rica is doing um why don't you just tell us about your background as you know uh i'm the head of education at mouse belt we have a university program a hundred different universities all over the world who have interacted with us and i know that you're really passionate about education and training developers especially for eos so maybe you could speak to you know how did you get into blockchain and do you have any advice for students who might be interested in joining this industry sure um well my background is in finance and accounting and i spent uh 13 years in different investment banks in new york city so i'm definitely in a traditional finance background and my experience with blockchain was definitely a family affair my my co-founder is my brother and our chairman and kind of the head of r d is is our father uh who started us all in this journey so um i would say that some advice for students there's no wrong path you know whether that's a career path whether that's an academic path or or a family path um i think there are so many different areas around blockchain and sectors to concentrate on that whether you're a finance major or a philosophy major there's definitely room for for you in this sector yeah i always try to encourage students to add blockchain as kind of a domain expertise like no matter what their major is find what they're good at and then apply it to blockchain because that's just going to give them a competitive edge in whatever the industry they're in right we're going to need crypto lawyers we're going to need media people we especially need you know people who can communicate the value and import of these technologies um to drive adoption so that's great advice uh so interesting that you work with all of your family i just got off another interview with someone whose father was you know in the bot.com boom always kind of ahead of the game gave him a computer very young and they run a podcasted events company together so uh it was your father who got you interested in bitcoin blockchain uh yeah he um he's always been into new technologies i started the first bbs in 1987 here in costa rica which was kind of the uh beginning of the internet uh peer-to-peer systems uh he's always been a a a passion around decentralized networks either ham radios through the beginning of the internet through the 90s uh always had a computer in our house um and he's the one that's really kind of pushed us into into this realm but we've always had technology in our household and uh especially ones that allow for individual freedom so blockchain has always been kind of top of mind since since uh satoshi nakamoto's white paper in our household yeah and it so it sounds like he's always looking for the next solution right to some of these problems that we might have with uh internet connectivity payments so tell me how you guys started uh to look into bitcoin as a solution to some of the problems that you had with business in costa rica sure um our legacy business was a internet infrastructure business where we have servers in a data center here we provide web hosting co-location and dedicated servers uh for clients all over the world and uh during probably the last uh two decades we've been concentrating on that business and um it's native to the internet and we were looking for a payment system that was also native to the internet we had a lot of problems with fraud around credit card payments uh speed and cost around bank wires using uh moneygram or western union wasn't uh feasible as either so we were always looking for a a more efficient native uh means of payment on the internet and that's how we discovered bitcoin around 2013 2014 and really really that set off um the investigation behind the technology and blockchain and how we can view blockchains as clients themselves blockchain networks as clients themselves now we can support different networks with our infrastructure as a as a as a business sector so that was the beginning we became the first company in costa rica to accept bitcoin uh the first to also run a full node that we know of um and since then we've been investigating different different protocols that leads to to what we do today with eos io yeah well that's the the power and promise of bitcoin and blockchain right is this borderless payments and and really solving these problems of fraud and uh money wires so seems like a natural direction to go especially for a team so kind of plugged into innovation on the internet um and now you have invested a lot of time and resources into a specific protocol uh eos for people who are just tuning in who may not be familiar can you kind of walk us through that decision um how you discover different protocols what the benefits and drawbacks are and why you uh like eos so much right well um like i mentioned we started with bitcoin and running nodes validator nodes uh of bitcoin then we started investigating to proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms so we started running nodes for dash which is another proof of stake um cryptocurrency looking at any uh blockchain that would really pay us reward us to run infrastructure so we started investigating with storage sia great coin uh all of the the the first kind of generation of uh blockchain uh protocols and cryptocurrencies um we view bitcoin as at first generation ethereum as a second generation where you start to build smart contracts uh on a distributed and decentralized ledger and then the third generation was uh what we consider is eos io where you start to have more scalability you use a delegated proof of stake and some other functions and and um capacities that we feel are necessary for real-world real-world use cases and we had in the that investigation had uh met and uh followed dan larimer which also started bitshares and steam we were seeing witness for a while we'd run nodes for bitshares as well so we knew that dan larimer was a doer in that sense and when eos io came out we found that a lot of the benefits around using delegated proof of stake especially in open source allowed it to be very flexible to not only a public mainnet like eos public mainnet and some of the use cases around that but also for different types of governance structures whether that's private in enterprise use cases or public permissions like other regional chains that we're currently working on with the osio so that was the natural progression kind of starting a proof of work with bitcoin moving into proof of stake and then a proof of stake uh consensus mechanisms that lead us to eos io which we believe today is the the the best protocol open source protocol to use because it's the most flexible and we've used it from things like payments we've built uh decentralized exchanges using it we've used it in accounting and finance in the enterprise uh sector we've used it in logistics we've used it in traceability of health and and pharmaceuticals um and we've also used it in social impact with incentivizing blood donations so it's really a huge different spectrum of use cases and i think that speaks to the flexibility of the underlying protocol absolutely and i think it just fits so well with our theme of history of coins to talk about you know this first generation of bitcoin which i think is widely becoming to be considered best used as a store of value right the transactions take a long time um it's best as like digital gold or the the first thing that we kind of figured out the problem of the double spend with satoshi's white paper coming out in 2008 first generation of this kind of web 3.0 and now we're seeing with ethereum okay there's a lot more you can do but we're starting to see a lot of congestion on the network um exorbitant gas fees so with this third generation of different consensus mechanisms you can have a lot more flexibility a lot more real world use cases which is going to drive adoption right um and i i asked you before the interview started you know what applications do you even have on your cell phone like what is the everyday person using blockchain for um they're not using bitcoin to buy their coffees or if they are it's just not really the best thing to do with it um so can you tell us some more of the exciting use cases some of your favorites that are on the eos network sure um the the one i've been using a lot lately is as i mentioned is called upland it's a property trading game that saves the the properties as nfts on the us blockchain um and allows you to trade between players uh in close to real time uh with no transaction fees and there's use cases you know for everything uh bitcoin is great for as you mentioned store value and um maybe moving large uh amounts of money in in in in record time i mean if you want to you know move a case of gold right a bitcoin would be a great use case well that's that's that's the comparison right if you want to buy a cup of coffee or something that's that's that's low well maybe maybe the means of exchange is not the best use case uh ethereum might be great for for for uh decentralized finance contracts because it's got a lot of locked value so there's a lot of security around that you might have a larger um confidence around using a smart contract than ethereum um but it might not be good for a social media application right if you're if every like and every post costs gas to do that um if you're using it as a chat you know in every message or every um you know emoji scent cost you gas that's not a great user experience if you're using it for gaming that needs to be quick and the latency needs to be low you might look at other protocols and that's where eosio kind of has as has brought in this idea of a general purpose blockchain and there's many others that have that have followed with that same um value proposition so like i mentioned i use it for a property trading game but we've used it for things like blood donation incentivizing where if you don't have to pay for transaction fees uh you're not disincentivizing certain actions um i've also used it for social media uh clearly if we look back at the beginning of the internet right and i told you that every time you had to go to a website you had to pay right that's not going to be a good user experience and uh we've come up with the idea of well if i want to own a domain right then i have to pay for it right so i have to own some sort of property on the internet and then users can come in and out right if i have too many users i have to have more resources to supply those but the the transactions the the the interactions with the user is always free and that's the kind of analogy i like to use with eosio as well it's like i'm buying a amount of resources based on the amount of usage i feel i'm going to get and i'm going to allow free usage for those users because i don't feel like i need to charge every time they come in and for us it's it's allowed us to build things for enterprise build things for like i mentioned logistics uh container traceability um we're looking at things in pharmaceuticals and also gaming right i mean eosio is used in a lot of different gaming applications wax is one of the largest digital collect collectibles marketplace that uses eosio so i'm excited to see what other use cases pop up right for right now we think it's the most flexible and the most general but we'll see what new use cases will pop up soon yeah could you explain that a little bit more for uh especially some of our newcomers uh tuning in uh just how exactly the eos protocol works for uh keeping the transactions free for users but um you know just as the internet works paying for a domain and this is like the transactions fees on the network right yeah and uh one the blocks are shorter so the speed is quicker um one used a delegated proof of stake so you have less um nodes that need to sync at the same time but to put it in terms that i l you know that i understand and i think is maybe quicker to understand or to grasp for some of the audience members is let's let's let's think of a toll road right of a toll road on a highway um you invest in that in that highway and every time you pass your car you need to pay a toll there's a transaction fee for using that highway what if you purchased part of that highway to use that amount of resources or that amount of space a certain amount of times a day so every time i pass through that toll road i don't necessarily have to pay because i've already paid to you know have one small car pass by as many times as i want per day if clearly if i have a semi truck i'm going to have to purchase more of that highway more of those resources and i own that they're not combustible you don't spend it every time you go you kind of own it for the amount of resources you need so if if i have enough for one car i can use it and go through the transactions are free as many times as i can as long as it you know in that highway there's space for the amount that i've purchased but if i need to then use an suv or a larger truck or a semi i would have to then purchase more of that highway in order to use it but i'm free to transact i'm free to move in and have a better user experience currently ethereum and other proof-of-work mechanisms that have gas or transaction fees you pay every time you go through right um and that's uh a block or a um a uh yeah just a blocker to adoption right it's just uh an income um an inconvenience to the user similar to what i just mentioned as an example like going to a website and having to pay every time you want to go it might be sense it might be fractions of a cent but you still have to have it in your wallet and you still have to pay every time you go so we're trying to avoid that and we think that eosio does that in a very elegant manner does that present any challenges for a someone who might want to build an application if they have a ton of user growth in a short amount of time yeah i think it does present some benefits and challenges maybe changing the paradigm of how we think right because we have a lot of users the users are going to be paying for those transactions right so for example uniswa the largest uh decks on in the world actually right now in terms of volume and the largest on ethereum you have to you have to use gas every time you do a transaction on it right um uniswap and the developers don't really need to focus on on that it's based on the network and the use of use of the network right using ethereum if i was going to build that on on eos um i would then have to calculate well how many users do i expect to have and how many resources do i have to provide because i can purchase resources for my users they don't have to pay so they can come and use my decks without actually having to use gas fees it's a investment of capital that might be tough for for a startup but it also scales with you because at first as if if you're starting off and you don't have that many users you're not going to need that many resources also resources are much cheaper in in the protocol so as you scale you would have to not only have more users more income in your revenue model but also be able to scale with with the more resources you would need so it does prevent it does present some challenges but those are challenges that that that equal and maybe surpass and the benefits that they provide which means you need a plan for what your resources look like with any startup has to do anyways right it's a scalability problem with anything right customer service um resources on the cloud if you're doing that and hosting that on the cloud so very similar in that manner yeah i think the way you explain it it's uh easy for people who have worked in other areas of the internet could understan uh so let's talk more about exactly what you're doing with us costa rica and uh the different parts of your business and uh i know you do a lot of stuff in education which i'm really excited to hear about similar to mouseville and mouseville university and why that's a strategic business choice for you right yes eos costa rica started in 2018 it was a spin-off of the legacy business i mentioned earlier on um from the hosting business and we focus on three clear areas one of them is providing infrastructure for eosio based blockchains two is developing interpret enterprise-grade applications using eosio so that means we have enterprise clients that we build on their behalf or we build in-house software where we have the ip and we license it out and thirdly as you mentioned we provide developer content in spanish and in english for developers to learn how to develop on esio as well as webinars and content related to blockchain awareness and adoption in the region and that is right up there with the other three business or two business lines not as a uh social responsibility even though we do believe that's important but it's it's very strategic in our model we think that we can only have a sustainable business in providing robust and secure reliable infrastructure or uh enterprise grade applications if we have the correct talent pool and that's the biggest challenge i think um i'm not too worried about finding new use cases for blockchain i'm not too worried to find about finding new clients for blockchain i'm worried about finding um the developers needed to scale those in in the manner that's needed and so that's why we've concentrated and invested a lot on the educational portion and um that's key to our business and to the sustainability of our business um how are we doing that um well we've partnered with with uh the largest tech university here in costa rica uh we have an internship program where we allow the interns to work on open source software and try to develop and one of the first things they work on is the guides and the developer principles and contribution guidelines that we use so the first thing they do is actually work on the content that other developers behind them are going to use so uh we we find that that became becomes a virtuous cycle right and hopefully what we have is a new generation of interns coming in becoming uh junior developers mid-level developers and senior developers teaching the other generation coming through and improving the content of that program as we go through and i think that's key to a sustainable business and hopefully if we do it right and we stay committed we'll put costa rica on the map as a blockchain hub especially for highly specialized software like blockchain absolutely so that's definitely our mission as well with mouse belt blockchain accelerator we have a development shop that builds projects we want to you know link together talent industry and and infrastructure and we definitely see this as a long-term investment in the space investing in education we launched the blockchain education alliance which is some of the protocols and even layer 2 solutions and enterprise such as banks and and even beverage distribution companies that we've identified to be particularly interested in investing in education and resource research so as someone also building out these kinds of programs what would you say for any of these companies who might be tuning in right now what would you say to them like how to get started or what they should be doing or what they should be investing in in order to ensure that they have a talented developer pool to to create a sustainable business yeah i think that's key i mean in our experience uh we've done um everything from building a blockchain application for a top five accounting global accounting firm to partnering with a multilateral bank the inter-american development bank further blockchain regional blockchain in latin america to uh doing jv's with enterprises specifically in the logistics center sector for the traceability of containers so we've we've partnered with three different types of enterprise in these three examples one of them is private in financial sector the other one is a multilateral bank which is very closely related to government and public private partnerships and the other one is more of a jv structure and what we found in the three different examples and models i'm giving is it's always the innovation group it's always the the the thought leaders in those organizations that are looking for a cultural change and that are really looking to bring startup culture into their largely established traditional culture and um it's it's a cross-pollination of of of knowledge sharing right because we're trying to get all the knowledge sharing of their specific sector and the business logic and they're trying to not only learn about blockchain and the new in the tech stack we're using but also the way that we build and why we build that way agile methodologies and digital transformation etc um and it's it's in that sort of cross-pollination that the the common denominator is one it's always innovation-based always um groups that are willing to take risks and that know that you know we're building pocs we're building um mvps that are always looking to go to production but we're learning we're learning constantly um both of our organizations are learning and uh what we'll see is they'll bring junior um analysts or members of their organization we'll bring interns and uh junior members of our organization and since we're all starting at the same level in terms of learning it's a very collaborative environment and i think we encourage that and if if you're in a larger annexation or a startup there's always going to be a win-win situation where you can learn from both sides and bringing and involving the most junior ones of your members in that um in that exercise um is extremely beneficial i think for for both parties so this this constant learning and educational process is is not just one that's for the most junior and the newest members of any organization if anything it's it's a holistic approach for everything we do especially because there's so many rapid learnings that we have to do and and paradigm shifts that we have to do especially in the development process so i think you just need to incorporate it in everything you do yeah that's great advice um that it can only benefit them to include students more include interns more uh think about education not just uh for goodwill for the community or as like a social responsibility but also for their own team educating themselves and yeah i definitely have that mindset i always want to have an intern who is actively in school for the university program because i just think it's so important to have fresh perspectives and especially tap into the the student perspective when you're building a educational programs um so that's great yeah and keeping in the theme with a history of coins um so interesting that it was you were the first company to accept bitcoin in costa rica ran the first bitcoin node in in costa rica uh tell us more about latin american and blockchain adoption in general or things in costa rica what were some of the big moments in crypto in costa rica where is it at now and where do you think it's going yeah i think costa rica has an interesting story um you know we've been we've been part of it since the beginning but it's really a large community of of innovators and tickers here um there's always been a big push into technology in costa rica probably since the 1990s focusing on um maybe starting with with with intel uh building one of their biggest uh chip factories here for a long time until uh was exporting microchips from costa rica and that be that began this sort of environment to bring um tech companies and tech focused uh careers to costa rica and the university bees followed suit so there's always been a high i would say fertile ground for developers and and tech and software here and uh the blockchain community has been no different and you know it started kind of as a few companies and a few entrepreneurs um a few lawyers a few um you know crypto minded and and tech curious people uh then we formed an association so the blockchain association which now kind of unifies that whole voice not only to policymakers to regulators but also to join alliances outside of costa rica in latin america and abroad and uh it's really started this this uh movement here where costa rica has always been known to be one of the longest lasting democracies in latin america very politically stable environmentally friendly open elections open data um and that's fertile ground as well for for crypto currencies and for blockchain in terms of regulation it's been very hands off i think there's only been one communication from the central bank saying hey if you use blockchain or crypto assets based on blockchain it's really done at your own risk there's an interesting kind of uh law here that allows you to pay employees and species which means you can pay in in the commodity maybe that that you're you're making so if you're picking coffee you can pay your employees and coffee if you'd like partially so that's kind of allowed companies to also pay employees encrypted in cryptocurrency if they're working on blockchain nodes for example or working on on um getting paid in cryptocurrency you can use that as a payroll solution so costa rica is sort of in this uh very well positioned jurisdictional uh environment but also geographically we're between two large continents um that allow you to build low latency nodes and infrastructure which i think is going to be extremely important moving forward and hopefully costa rica um continues to grow uh with the the help of companies like ourselves and communities like the blockchain association and others to really help build this and not to see it as a threat to terms in terms of banks and and regulation and government but really as an opportunity and one of the coolest things i think we've seen especially in this postcovid kind of world is that uh tech and tech jobs and tech careers and blockchain specifically allow you to work from anywhere and we look for students and interns and developers and collaborators that are not necessarily in the metropolitan area and allows you to go to let's say universities that have satellite campuses outside of the large metropolitan area and what you see is a flourishing of that community because no longer do you need to leave your family to go to the city to get a job you can do it there and you can earn you know high wages working from there and then you end up spending it in that same community and improving the life but also the opportunities that they have so it's really wonderful to see that and hopefully blockchain tech really makes it even easier um and if costa rica sees it as an opportunity it's just a microcosm of what happens in the world right you don't have to go to new york san francisco london sydney um and toronto or any other uh uh israel for example you can you can build great tech from anywhere where you are and why not do it from with great weather and great beaches and and uh great rain forest is down here so hopefully this is an invitation to everybody to say hey um come down to costa rica and try and build your career here um and hopefully we have an environment a government community that's that's welcome to that definitely feeling a little jealous of costa rica weather here in denver i mean most of the us right having some of the worst storms uh ever and i think with the coldest uh weekend i've had since living in denver last weekend so definitely jealous of that and um i've seen the same thing too and i and i try to tell people or companies and blockchain this all the time is that the coastal regions in the us get a lot of attention already you know there's san francisco la new york mit uc berkeley as far as universities go but we have touch points with universities all over the us and in other countries and in the rural universities and the state schools there's actually a lot of passionate students doing really great things starting startups doing conferences and trying to encourage big players in the blockchain space to look more to the to the rural and state schools as well and and from what you're saying you know hopefully encouraging some people to look into investing more into costa rica so that's awesome yeah definitely i mean shout out to denver i mean it's become a blockchain hub in itself um embracing this technology you know university of wyoming as well the city of detroit uh you know all these different places have embraced this and um and a community of developers that are building cool things in in places that uh you know maybe don't get as much attention but definitely should yeah absolutely and uh just to wrap up you know it's still kind of the new year the beginning of the year uh bitcoin just broke 50k um seems like you know there's a lot of good things coming for the future uh any anything that you see coming down the pipeline for 2021 some predictions or just goals and and things that you'll be achieving with eos uh costa rica in the next year what's what does 2020 look like to you or 2021 look like to you yeah um i think if we've been in the space for for a while you know these are these are cycles uh everything's positive clearly we try to keep our heads down and keep building and keep for focusing on real world use cases more than than chasing the new shiny thing but there's a lot there's a lot of shiny things out there to chase and a lot of things to be excited about and you know i've been called easily encouraged before so i don't think that's a bad thing um but we are really excited for um i think three things or i'm very excited about three things one the emergence of regional blockchains public uh permissioned regional blockchains i think the answer of the bsn network in china um seeing that in europe and western europe and what we're seeing with the inter-american development bank with black chain being a public permission uh infrastructure infrastructure for public goods it's like building a pan-american highway right it's supported by multilateral banks it's financed by um member states really and it's focused on building the infrastructure so all the the different use cases it's it's sort of you know coordinating to have the backbone of the internet um be available to as many people as possible in this case having the backbone be via blockchain and we're really excited to see uh to see that especially developed in latin america there's some really cool use cases popping up but you need to have that first layer and that layer is the infrastructure second decentralized id self-sovereign id i think that's really gonna pop up it's another one of those really important building blocks to get to those use cases you know it's really hard to have um true ownership uh digital ownership right if we don't have a good solution for decentralized id verified credentials and self-sovereign id where it doesn't necessarily be the the country you were born that gives you the id that allows you to open a bank account or buy a home or uh apply to a university right it's a conjunction of all the verified credentials that you've built along your life um and that's really going to allow and empower the individual we're really excited to see how blockchain allows for for for decentralized id methods and self-sovereign id uh and lastly i think um one thing i think is is is going to really be a game changer is is you know nfts and digital collectibles um i think you know we've seen what what what decentralized finance can do to to the financial sector but uh non-fungible tokens and digital scarcity right the idea of ownership and scarcity um seeing what uh nba top shot is doing i don't know if you've checked it out but owning highlights right we can own a piece of content a unique piece of content uh that's provable tradable and uh and also fun um i'm really excited to see what other pieces of content we can tokenize and own um and i think that's so cool if i see a rookie uh with a cool hot highlight and i can buy it and own it and maybe sell it to coke for a commercial later on in life um or just play it as many times as i want as the same thing as i have a trophy case of of uh you know uh you know a little league baseball or something that's so tangible and blockchain allows for that right that that feeling of nostalgia and of unique and digital ownership um is really going to be very cool to see so i'm excited about that as well a little bit more of a fun way yeah it's definitely a hot topic right now and uh during our last conference we had a little nft gallery we had some nfts that you could scan a qr code and buy in between some of our segments so i hope that we get to do that again well edgar um if people want to find you where can they find you and who are you most hoping gets in touch sure um we're eos costa rica eos costa rica dot io you can find us on all our you know large social networks as uh eocr on telegram eos costa rica on twitter um and hopefully anyone who wants to learn more about the blockchain ecosystem in costa rica is welcome to to reach out to us whether it's eos io based or not we are agnostic in that sense um and hopefully people that want to build real world solutions whether that's a large enterprise or a small startup we want to partner and focus on helping you build that and lastly students students out anywhere i know we mentioned our intern program that's locally in costa rica but we have partnered with other us-based universities and hopefully others outside of the us but if you're a student willing to work remote or hopefully the world will allow us to to do it in person come down here to costa rica to work with us we're open international students sponsoring that as well so thank you so much ashley for the time and invitation uh hopefully we'll be invited back at the the next series absolutely thanks again edgar it's uh edgar fernandez from eos costa rica thanks for joining us and stay tuned for more reimagine 2020. 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