🎙 Santiago Siri | Layer Zero

i'm like okay there's a silver lining in all of this maybe the country had to go through [ __ ] uh in order to be the most apt country for you know leading in terms of crypto adoption out there welcome to layer zero player zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but is composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code

they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been today on layer zero we were talking to santiago siri otherwise known as santi.ethe on twitter and santiago has been a community leader in the uh argentina space for as long as i've been in crypto uh while he doesn't currently live in argentina he still spends a ton of his uh mental energy and attention there santi was recently with vitalik as vitalik went around argentina and uh

experiencing what argentina is like now that crypto has truly entered the argentine space and argentina has always had this very uh involved story with with crypto argentina is a very internet connected nation with high inflation and high capital controls and also a very strong developer community and so it's kind of this perfect breeding ground for a crypto society they actually need crypto for the reasons that crypto are

is useful in the first place and it has just a an internet fluent society that really allows that expression that need of crypto to really manifest and so santi tells the story of more or less the fall of argentina from a burgeoning metropolis in the late 80s and 90s down to just a very cutthroat society because of the role of inflation and the loss of savings by so many people in the country also the the introduction of just corruption and from the government in capital controls

and now what is perhaps going to be the other side of that story as crypto enters the scene and santi tells a story of how it's not really it's not like uh how we know america or maybe the rest of the world where you have society and then you have the crypto people uh santi tells a story of how argentina is becoming a crypto enabled society uh all of them uh and so it made me very very interested in going down to argentina myself and experiencing that for myself uh and just to see what a society looks like when everyone is on

board with the whole crypto thing uh and so i really enjoyed this conversation with santi and i'm sure you are going to as well so we'll get right into that conversation right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you me shopping now bro you want to spend when you know you should be saving never buy a house at this rate but what if you could spend and save at the same time for the enlightened kind with inquiring minds a new world awaits

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one-stop shop for all of your financial needs go to ledger.com grab a ledger and download ledger live to get all of your defy applications all in one place hey santi how's it going hey david all good how are you good fantastic uh we've been around each other's periphery for a really long time now and uh i think this is gonna be the first time where we're gonna have a very long in-depth conversation so i'm excited to unpack a bunch of interesting stuff well yeah looking forward to it yeah it's true we've probably seen each other

across many conferences around the world and we follow each other's steps on twitter and social media so it's good to to finally get to know each other a little bit definitely that's exactly what these layers layer zeros are for i use them as a tool to get to know the people that i want to know better but then also do that in public so other people can get to know you so my first question for you is santi what do you care about wow that's a good good icebreaker right there

you know i come from argentina which is a developing country uh that has argentina has this tragic story of being a hundred years ago probably one of the wealthiest nations out there getting a lot of immigrants from spain from italy from all over the world during the first world war and even during the second world war and something happened in the country something broke something stopped working the way it did a hundred years

ago and now it's a suffering latin american country uh developing nations struggling from one economic crisis to the next one uh with 50 of the people living under the poverty line uh with a high inflation with a broken economic system with very corrupt politicians and my quest with technology throughout my career has always been trying to figure out what we can do with digital technology with information

technology that can help improve people's lives in argentina and in latin america really inequality is very visible very rampant all over the place and the one thing that i've seen change the world change reality change the way i live it change the way my community lives in a positive way has never been the politicians or you know the the next leader or the next great charismatic figure out there but has always been

technology like i've seen throughout my life i'm almost 40 years old i'm 38 and i've seen the rise of personal computing in the 80s and 90s i've seen the emergence of the internet in the late 90s and 2000s and now with the blockchain and ethereum it's uh it's like this thing that keeps on unfolding in front of our very eyes and he has a tremendous promise to impact countries like mine that are desperately looking for an alternative because none of the existing systems and

none of the existing monetary systems the dollar whatever you mean you know whatever it is they don't work anymore over there and um i guess like my my common denominator across the many projects that i have been involved with some some projects with a connection to politics other projects with a connection to crypto you know in a prior life i was into game development um the one common denominator is helping you you know use technology to

help improve people's lives to improve people's uh you know have an impact in people's pockets directly like no no strings attached and that's a that's i think technology can be such a disruptive force in in a region like latin america where you know we we definitely are desperate for alternatives because nothing of the traditional circus work for us so i care you know when i think about why i

choose the process projects i choose or why i work on what i work on mostly has to do with this memory of growing up in latin america and you know trying to figure out how to improve society around me you uh you were born and raised in argentina that was where your childhood was yes in buenos aires uh i lived there almost 30 years what was it like growing up there uh because as i've come to know argentina i've known it as you know back in the

i think the 70s and the 80s it was just a burgeoning metropolis of just agriculture and just really good really good food and culture what was it like growing up there before things broke so i was born in 1983 and in 83s when democracy got uh restored in in argentina you know we we've been a democracy since then so i lived in democratic argentina mostly the chapter prior to that the dictatorship we have from 76 to 83 has

been a very brutal and a very violent event in the country uh with 30 000 people being disappeared by the government a brutal i don't know we could call it a civil war between right you know fascists and and and left-wing guerrillas that were you know making terrorist attempts and killing each other so i appeared in the country right when the country finally after the falklands war the falcons malvinas were i should say

right after the country got back its democracy and even though we became a democratic country in argentina i would say it's still a very democratic country where you when you look go through the options that you have to vote you will find options on the extreme left on the extreme right and a lot of in the middle and those options they all get votes then it's not like uh there's a lack of representation in ideological terms but uh from an economic standpoint in the 80s we had hyperinflation

uh in 89 99 89 1990 i was six seven years old back then but uh prices changed every day like the inflation rate was five thousand percent a year uh this means that you know the prices that you have for products on a given day the next day supermarkets companies everyone had to price everything again uh and it was that led to a huge crisis um big economic crisis that led to the first president alfonsin to not finish

his his presidency uh and eventually in the 1990s uh another guy came along called carlos menem who ruled argentina for 10 years and carlos menon kind of figured out how to fight inflation he semi-idolarized the economy he put he made a law that one one argentine peso should equal one us dollar and develop a strong connection to the us this is after the berlin wall fell so

probably the world became more americanized after the fall of the berlin wall so most of my childhood and teenage years were during that epoch and in that period the problem was not inflation anymore but it was unemployment uh because buying us dollars suddenly was very cheap in argentina that meant that imports were very cheap rather than you know producing stuff in the country so a lot of factories a lot of uh companies had to close doors because it

was simply cheaper to import goods from from abroad and uh that's a that's like the tragedy of argentina you know you go from dealing with huge inflation and then you all dealing with huge unemployment and it doesn't seem like we're able to find like a middle ground in the way we do things and that has led to i think in argentina in the context of latin america has always been very good at generating very skilled entrepreneurs very resilient entrepreneurs um i

remember the the dot-com years i was already a teenager when i had internet access for the first time broadband access later on and in the late 90s argentina was able to produce some of the largest e-commerce companies if not the largest e-commerce company in latin america and that's a has been a common denominator of argentine entrepreneurs being able to capture the latin american market basically because brazil speaks another language and it's a has a huge domestic

market so they don't care what happens outside brazil and mexico has a lot of the talent uh actually going to the us uh because it's right there so argentina always strategically had a very strong position of generating good entrepreneurs and building technology that historically has been a leader in the region in latin america and i think our history of you know knowing that we're dealing with a very broken economic system that we will deal

with inflation we will deal with uh you know we will deal with a lot of kinds of bizarre crises that you can you know you cannot even imagine but it's a country that is constantly under you know whenever i talked to my mom today i asked her well how's argentina doing and she tells me worse than ever before and that's always her answer for the last seven years since i left uh and it's always like getting worse and worse but at the end of the day that has led to the like the argentine people to be very

resilient very resourceful uh very entrepreneurial very uh capable of thinking outside the box and you know i i i was lucky enough that i grew up with a family that uh you know gave me a good education i was able to travel around the world to visit europe or visit the us when i was a child and that helped certainly help open up my mind uh in a great way and like that had a lasting impact in my life and that's why i'm probably talking to you here in

english or i develop a career more more internationally but when i look back at the country its people are are amazing like it's an incredible bunch of creative uh lateral thinkers that can come up with incredible solutions and you know fast forward to today i see it in the crypto community in argentina a lot of the innovation being built around ethereum uh being built around bitcoin uh a lot of the the mines that are emerging from from argentina

engineers developers hackers entrepreneurs are simply brilliant by any international measure and this is literally the children of hyperinflation the children of uh you know the comparativity that led to huge unemployment in the 90s you know i wish we could find a formula for our country we always tell say told ourselves that we're a country of individuals who are very good at the individual level but

probably not so good at the community or team level i collectively we don't seem to work efficiently we cannot even manage our own country but individually you know we produce probably the best soccer players in the world or we produce a great entrepreneurs that whenever they have to go abroad they become very successful but internally in the country it's like a messed up place and uh you know it's always a challenge uh but you know it's the place i was born and it's the place i love and and and you know

there's a lot of fantastic things about our culture and you know how we treasure friendship or how we connect with other people that it's something really special i want to definitely have this individual versus collective um theme as one of the crux of this conversation but before we in order to get there i want to keep on unpacking some of just the um originating influences of argentina the thing i want to learn um the most right now is is uh

what was the order of operations for this like change in argentina uh like we i think inflation is at the very beginning of the story but what caused inflation like what was the original um thing that started this cascading set of events well it's um inflation has always been a constant i you know there depends on who you ask you will get different answers to this question for sure you know there will be the monetaries that will tell you is you know they are printing and printing and

printing money and that's probably maybe the case uh i'm pretty sure that you know in the 80s when we had hyperinflation the only solution that the government could come up with was let's just print more money and that led to a disaster um then there could be you know there are other factors in place as well it's a kind of argentine as a country very much dependent on commodity prices uh our biggest export is soy and soy prices go up they go down when there are you know good years argentina

has a lot of reserves when there are bad years the country is about to explode in a in a crisis um so and you know there's a lot of people you know simply playing the media playing playing politics uh behind people's you know interests and that you know you know it's a it's a bit of a tragic consequence we're still you know dealing with that today over the last 20 years argentina again when uh the convertibility or the you

know the ability to convert u.s dollars to pesos one to one when that economic project ended we went back to an inflationary model and the currency has systematically lost its value 200 times so in the 90s it was one peso one dollar when that ended uh in 2001 we had a huge crisis and now we are back to 200 pesos one dollar suddenly our currency lost 200 times its value in the last 20 years and um you know the economic factors the

external factors probably has to do with commodity prices and macro uh variables like that and from and from the internal standpoint because the country has such a has a lot of a i would say like uh humanitarian problems like uh if you walk through the streets of buenos aires and actually we did this with vitalik uh there are some huge slabs in the middle of the most wealthy neighborhoods in the city so you have this huge inequality in the country and uh with vitalik we

actually visited one of these slums so he could get a close view of you know how a lot of people live in a country like argentina not just the tourist version of the country and you see this inequality all over the place uh there's a five more than five thousand slams where people do not have access to basic goods to basic water to basic needs uh they might have you know the youth smartphones and an internet connection uh so the people are connected but like infrastructure is

simply not there and sadly the i guess like many populist politicians uh their only solution or the only remedy to address a situation like that is let's just put you know money in their pockets regardless of taking any consideration of how that money is created they just print it and that that populist formula uh you know works for a little while and in the long run generates this situation of the country losing value

significantly and you know it's simply a very tragic consequence because it perpetuates the position people are living in the lack of infrastructure the lack of investment it perpetuates the inequality and it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy so it because the inequality keeps growing people you know politicians keep printing and the more they print you know the more the status quo remains it's the same and there's simply it seems to me that at least from the

generations above me you know that they go over the country in the past they are simply not able to think outside the box uh the discussion in argentina has always been shall we agree with the imf and get some u.s dollars to strengthen our currency but get a huge debt and the debt keeps growing with the imf or we give our back to the imf and suddenly we become a pro venezuela pro cuba country disconnected from the financial world

and you know we try to do the revolution quote unquote and none of these approaches are really you know addressing people's problems addressing the situation from a structural or from a systemic point of view it's just opportunist populist politicians taking advantage and misusing uh public resources uh you know regardless of the ideological sign of who is in charge

uh and you know i think that today we have there's a generational change at least the the crypto generation or the online generation let's not call them millennials you know we have the online generation the offline generation the online generation is growing up you know i'm probably one of the oldest members of that generation but there's a lot of kids from you know between 20 and 30 years old that are now suddenly uh thinking in a much different way about money

about the value about uh you know connected to the world and looking you know realizing that argentina is not a special case in the planet that you know we we can certainly think globally and connect with with the world at large and there's a new generation that i hope starts thinking about these issues in a different way i see it in the development front the developer community the soft the hackers the software developers are certainly uh innovating in a way that has no

precedent in the country for the first time there are projects being born in argentina that are global they are not looking at latin america as a market but are actually thinking in global terms uh there's a generation of engineers that have created some of the most successful companies built around ethereum uh thinking about you know crypto and technology uh as a way of addressing some of the challenges that society is facing and you know i recently visited argentina just a few weeks ago

for vitalik's trip there and i haven't been there since before the pandemic and it was kind of like suddenly uh getting into a like the back to the futures car and actually traveling to the year 2034 because it really felt very futuristic everyone under 30 years old recognized vitalik in the streets they knew who he was they knew about ethereum they asked him about ethereum 2.0 or you know what is the merge gonna happen like

random people in the streets uh most of them obviously under probably under 30 years old but it's like uh in the pandemic a lot of people suddenly accelerated their uh learning skills about crypto or got into crypto in argentina we have a high inflation capital controls the it's it's illegal to buy u.s dollars even though there's a uh uh a dark or a black market of it

uh and we have uh subsidized energy so everyone and their mothers are mining crypto they're having miners at home like uh it's it's almost insane you you see that like in the restaurant where we were with vitalik the waiter came to ask him for a picture the taxi driver asked him things about crypto everyone suddenly vitalik discovered that he has big shagal status in argentina and i think that the pandemic accelerated people learning about this technology the bull market

also benefited a lot of people and suddenly there's like i perceived for the first time in new zealand asia in argentina that it's uh really connected to this stuff in a way that is way more significant than what i see here in spain where i live in spain it's a you know it's the euro comfort zone uh the the the state the welfare state works fantastic people live a very secure life they they are everyone is in a comfort level that they are not not

that anyone no one is taking any risks in europe uh in spain like very there's very few entrepreneurs very few crypto mines whereas in argentina it's like everywhere you see it in the billboards in the streets there's uh the you know the most important streets are filled with advertisement about crypto startups and crypto companies and it's i feel like the country is like making a leapfrog after the pandemic in adoption not only at the developer level which is what i knew but what caught me by

surprise is that at the user level uh you were seeing this kind of popular adoption of of of ethereum and and bitcoin and all of this new tech and to me that speaks greatly about what crypto is achieving because from a geopolitical standpoint argentina is you know at the end of the world it's a forgotten country third world nation struggling through financial crisis to financial crisis and in the last seven years uh i've been

pretty much in over 30 countries following the ethereum crowd following you know the this revolution around the world and the fact that argentina is suddenly growing in adoption so aggressively speaks greatly of crypto speaks greatly of this technology because it means that the technology is being impacting the most where it's really needed the most uh in argentina it's not a theoretical quirk to learn about crypto or an investment opportunity it's for a lot of people a necessity they need it they

can't buy dollars they are filled with pesos that are worthless they need this thing and to me that gives me a lot of hope about the future of the country uh the past of the country is a disaster i can tell you uh but it's still a great country with great people and i think that this new generation or what crypto is doing there uh it's a very fertile ground for this technology and some years ago it was still a thing of us the nerds you know but today you know it's on mainstream media when

vitalik was there you turned on the tv in argentina every news show was talking about this guy and that was a a revelation probably to italic discovering that he'll probably be facing this more and more in the future anywhere he goes uh so dealing with his celebrity status will be a challenge for him but i think he he will do fantastic because he's a he's simply an amazing human being he's a monk that travels around the world with his backpack speaking the word you know preaching the truth

uh and the but for argentina was a like a big epiphany for society like suddenly everyone was like hey you're into crypto i'm into crypto also like everyone and uh i i i'm a public figure there in the the crypto scene and whatnot and i realized that like the the the amount of messages and vms and emails and phone calls uh that i got since since that trip is beyond my my traditional level of information diet

and it gives me the signal that there's something very serious brewing up there and it's coming from you know from the youth bottom up it's not like the el salvador case where you know el salvador got lucky enough to have a millennial president and this guy sadly he's kind of a maximalist but he's pushing bitcoin through everyone's throats top down uh in argentina is bottom up adoption no and with vitalik we have been able to meet with an ex-president with a potential future president uh with the

government uh with a you know left-wing activist you met with a whole spectrum of uh leaders that the country has everyone left aside their differences that's the power that vitalik had uh not i don't think many people in the world can unite argentines uh like vitalik did and and it's because everyone is realizing that there's this thing happening in the with the new generations that is uh very

wild very well and uh that gives me hope you know the last little bit of context i want to unpack before uh getting even more into the crypto conversation is the um the background around uh the government and the people's uh trust or lack of trust in the government uh my general understanding of the argentine government was that at one point in time it was a democracy with its feet under itself making progress and then corruption kind