10-13, 12:00–12:30 (America/Bogota), Talk 5
To maximize the real-world utility of the Ethereum network, ether and ERC20 stablecoins must be increasingly used as money. This means being able to pay for goods and services without going through exchanges or banks. This talk will give a short history of the best efforts so far at onboarding merchants, dive into the anthropological reasons why this is a hard problem, and share our learnings on some recent successes on growing the number of crypto consumer purchases.
Alejandro is a co-founder of the Open Money Initiative and a product strategist at Bitrefill, the world's most popular site to buy real-world goods and services with cryptocurrency, including being able to pay water and electricity bills in El Salvador. He will talk about his observations on the ground in El Salvador, where the average citizen doesn't have a bank account, but does have a mobile phone, and a better-than-average awareness of bitcoin and its benefits.