Baleadas and Blockchain — Bringing Blockchain to Developing Economies
Honduran Cypherpunk Speakeasy
Cristian Espinoza is Alumni of Consensys Academy, BUIDL Honduras Ambassador and Co-Founder of Affogato, a platform that uses blockchain technologies to help coffee farmers to earn more money
Austin Thomas Griffith and a group of volunteers created a Burner Wallet 🔥👛 to help people in emerging economies onboard themselves into blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
The Boulder Blockchain meetup organized an event called Cypherpunk Speakeasy where the narrative was simple: we are in a future time where the US dollar is hyperinflated and credit card companies have long since passed. In order to buy food or beers, you have to pay with a cryptographically-backed currency.
We decided to bring a tropicalized Cypherpunk Speakeasy to Honduras and test the Burner Wallet in a real, developing economy to see how people who had never had mobile payments nor cryptocurrencies would react.
Welcome to the Future!
The narrative of the event was similar. The setting was the year 2029 and the Honduran Lempira had devalued 1000% (a future not far from reality thanks to an economic-social crisis and endemic corruption in Honduras state institutions caused by corrupt politicians).
At the start of the event, we explained the dynamics of the meetup and educated the group on xDAIs and stable coins. In the future, the price of everything had gone up except xDAIs, so if you bought some in the present they would have preserved their value and you could buy goods with no worries (unless you wanted to pay for a really overpriced baleada).
We had a small space where it was the year 2019, and a human ATM was exchanging cash for xDAIs.
Finally, you could go to the vendor and scan with your burner wallet the item that you wanted to purchase, pay, and enjoy your reward.
Next Steps
This wasn’t a traditional meetup of people well-versed in crypto. There were a lot of people with no knowledge about cryptocurrencies or blockchain, yet everyone who attended was able to use the burner wallet. Some people even traded themselves and played with it. We ended up selling around 40 baleadas and moved around 140 xDAIs.
Even though we had a few problems, we learned a lot from this experiment. Everything felt natural and we got some feedback from participants on how to improve the event for the following editions. Some of them are:
- Improving the vendor flow.
- Getting more xDAIs from the beginning (our initial supply was 50).
- Explaining more about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and the impact on the country’s financial system.
- Squaring away the money between us and the baleada vendor took some extra steps.
- Creating more combos and QR codes.
- Make the combo price an easy number to calculate.
- Have the gas fee in mind.
Thanks to everyone that made this event possible! The burner wallet is proof that the user experience is moving in the right direction. It’s still a long way ahead for the users to feel completely natural using the technology, but as early adopters, our mission is to help spread the voice and preach about the benefits of a decentralized economy.
** Help your local community by organizing your own events and be part of the BUIDL Network! You can get more information at buidlnetwork.net
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