1 Vision, 2 Men, more than 3 Countries: LATAM Blockchain will Spur Industry Growth in Spanish-Speaking World
This article is also available in Spanish.
On my trip to Consensus two weeks ago, in between the throngs of some 9,000 people crowded together at the Midtown Hilton, I managed to sneak off on the F train closer to Penn Station. There was a kosher restaurant there — Jerusalem (which is the inspiration for half the kosher restaurant names in the U.S. but we’ll get to that another time), where I was meeting a couple people.
These two friends, seniors at the Orthodox Jewish institution Yeshiva University (YU) uptown, didn’t exactly have the budget to go to Consensus. But in my preparation for the conference, I came across their project: LATAM Blockchain (Spanish).
LATAM, i.e. Latin America, will be a major undertaking of co-founders Menajem Benchimol and Jamie Gutt. Benchimol is from Colombia and Gutt from Venezuela. They represent a growing Latin American community at YU, as well as the growing number of students there getting deeply involved in new technologies.
“I’ve been involved in blockchain/crypto for a while, investing and trading a little bit,” Benchimol told me over pizza. “But we both decided we wanted to give back to their countries of origin.”
“We want them in on the blockchain party. We want them to leapfrog.”
Taking Latin America to School
LATAM would be at least a two-pronged operation: a non-profit educational arm on the one hand, a for-profit consulting service on the other. They already have partnerships with Blockchain at Berkeley and Lumit Blockchain in Mexico.
Gutt chimed in, “We want to educate them, — we start with education because we can’t offer a solution before they know what it is,” echoing a familiar call for more information by many in the industry. Gutt says they want the general public to start thinking beyond Bitcoin.
Their tactics don’t merely sound like a business plan — it sounds more like the outlines of a macroeconomic strategy.
Gutt and Benchimol want to turn crypto into a more efficient option for foreign remittances, where family members working in wealthier countries send money back to their less-well-off kin back home. Remittances have motivated dozens of fintech projects in the last several years, seeing technology as the answer to saving money on those transfers and integrating people without bank accounts into the global financial system.
The boys at LATAM Blockchain aren’t the first, but certainly are among the more enthusiastic, to see crypto as a way of making that finally happen en masse. They have already begun building a network of BTC ATMs.
“We will have three BTC ATMs in Panama and one in Chile — the law in Panama that makes Bitcoin legal tender,” explains Benchimol. “Governments are getting to know what it is. With our education, everything aligns, once they know more about it and its potential they will accept it more.”
Gutt chimes in, “We want to build a network of ATMs to facilitate people who wanted to remit money. It would be a faster way to send money to families back home,” Benchimol says. He also notes that companies like Western Union take 4–5 days, with a flat fee and a percentage taken off, something that would be far cheaper with the programs they envision.
Blockchain for Business isn’t One-Size-Fits-All
The consulting part of the business will be the moneymaker, guiding companies into the blockchain world. It will be an outlet for highlighting possible use cases for each customer. It’s a sorely needed service, one that Orbs sister company Hexa Labs is acutely aware of from its own consulting.
But just as one hand draws clients in, another may feel the need to hold others back.
“The primary goal is to have a consulting firm for LATAM countries, to describe and have solutions for them or to clarify if blockchain can even help them,” says Menajem.
Blockchain is still a young technology. Unique uses for it are uncovered pretty much weekly, but it is important to stress that there is no clear use for everybody.
“Latam needs a resource that can say ‘This is what it can do; what it can’t do,’” says Gutt. “‘This is how it can help your company; how it can’t; how to design it geared toward your company’s needs.’”
For now, they’re looking to use their senior summer (before graduating at the end of the fall semester) to find places to deepen their experience in a quickly expanding business industry.
As they begin planning out and writing Spanish-language courses, materials, and workshops, the two together stress that no matter how much preparation and instruction you get (but definitely, please get it — don’t just dive into this), the best way to get into the game is with experience.
“At the end of the day the best way to learn crypto is to buy. We want it available for everybody, not just the banked.”
To hear more about their project, listen to the video below:
This article is also available in Spanish.
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