People in Blockchain: Diego Gutiérrez from RIF/RSK Labs

Welcome to the first iteration of “People in Blockchain”!

Sharing with you the transcript of our online event. We invite our community to remotely discuss with entrepreneurs and visionaries and get to know awesome people from the crypto space. We edited out the greetings. The full chat untouched is available on StartupToken’s Telegram.

StartupToken is a Blockchain technologies consulting agency. We accelerated a dozen projects, built a specialized Master’s degree in partnership with 2 major schools in France (mastere.esce.fr) and much more.

Thank you Diego for joining us today.
First Diego, could you introduce yourself in a few words, who are you?

I’ve been an entrepreneur almost all of my life, at 9 I started going to the slums in Buenos Aires with my mother to do social work and at 11 I started programming, at 20 (in 1995) I found the web and found out that with technology I could impact the world in a meaningful way

When did you get into the Blockchain space and what attracted you?

In 2011 I’ve got in touch with Bitcoin (Blockchain didn’t exist back then 😉) but I didn’t get it at first until in 2012 a good friend of mine got my attention back to it. Back then in Argentina we had capital controls. So it was almost impossible to get money in or out of the country. and he did a little experiment with me where I opened an account on Blockchain.info. and he sent me 5000 bitcoin which I sent back minus one the he left to me to play around with it. the whole process took less than an hour and the cost was 0.0005 BTC. Then I realized that Bitcoin was a very powerful tool because we could interact circumventing government controls without asking permission to anybody and without intermediaries. After that I was 15 days almost not sleeping reading about it and soon after I started building Bitcoin communities all around Latin America with Rodolfo Andragnes, Franco Amati and later many others.

Even though this event is more about you than about the project, many people were curious about the status of RSK/RIF. So let’s talk about your most famous venture a bit, how far are we from a Dapps ecosystem on RSK?

First the full vision of RIF/RSK is to build what we call the Internet of Value on top of Bitcoin. We think that much like the Internet of Information that started with TCP/IP and then continued with email and later the Web, the Internet of Value will also be built with multiple protocols that serve a specific purpose. From that perspective, Bitcoin is the universal store of value, kind of a Digital Gold, but also is the safest decentralized network. That’s why when we created RSK we decided to leverage on the value and network effect of Bitcoin. RSK development started in 2016 with the purpose of extending Bitcoin capabilities in order to process smart contracts, represent other assets (fiat currencies, land / house titles, etc) and to scale on-chain transaction processing. We think that all was necessary if we wanted to create the financial system of the future, one that was inclusive and neutral.

What would you say to a developer to convince him to build a dapps on RSK rather than on Ethereum, EOS, Mainframe?

Well that’s where RIF comes in place, developing directly on any of those platforms and also in RSK directly is very complex for non blockchain developers and it’s also very risky like the loss of funds in Ethereum have shown.

Some efforts are being done to package basic functionality like what OpenZeppelin is doing but still that’s very low level for most developers and smart contracts is only one of the tools a developer needs. That’s why RIF was designed to add an additional layer on top of RSK that would provide all the missing functionalities (Directory Services, Off_chain Payments, Data Gateways, Data Storage / Distribution and Secure Communications) that a developer needs accessible through a single set of libraries that can be used on the Desktop or on a mobile device.

So the reason why a developer should use RIF/RSK stack is because it will enable him or her to create fully decentralized applications in the most efficient and secure way.

With my understanding, RSK is a generic platform for computing. Do you have a specific scenario to utilize it, or a business use case to share?

One very clear use case is Reputation based Identity, if you think about Uber, Airbnb, Ebay, all those businesses are based on enabling interactions between people and registering reputational events. With his technologies we will be able to give all that reputational information back to the person to whom it belongs. So the Ubers of the future will be built on top of this technologies.

This is particularly important in the context of financial inclusion where 2 billion adults in our world can’t have access to financial services because they don’t have material value to put as collateral but what everybody has, no matter how poor is, is a reputation and by recording that behaviour we can give anybody in the world the ability to show how valuable they are as human beings and use that as collateral to interact with others, trade, get credit and prosper.

As a CEO of a blockchain project, there must be many obstacles due to the industry, regulation, people, etc. What are the difficulties you faced/ are facing?

The challenges of CEO change as the organization and the ecosystem changes / grows. I think the biggest challenge today for the industry is to move from promise to delivery. We need to show the world what this technologies are capable of. We have some wins already Bitcoin is no doubt the best remittance network in the world and if you analyze any 3 years period is also the best mid/long term store of value.

Also ICOs disrupted fundraising and even though the model needs improvement to create a better balance between entrepreneurs rights and obligations towards investors I think the model will change how startups and innovation is funded.

But this is only the beginning and this technologies have the potential to go further and create the financial system of the future and to change how we govern our societies and that what we need to prove.

To wrap up the CEO question, as a CEO the main responsibility to set and validate the vision with the team, to attract the talent required to achieve that vision, to keep the organization well funded and to create the strategic relationships the organization needs. So the challenges are always related to that. Regarding regulation, I think there is always a tension between disruption and regulation. Skype disrupted international telecommunications and was unregulated for over a decade. Both sides will have to give up a little or a lot 🙂

Can you tell us about your interest in Blockchain for good? (Social impact projects, finance investing, international development…)

We have many projects working on this on RSK like https://www.givetrack.org/, https://www.b4h.world/, Didi and many more to come.

They work in different aspects from managing donations and use of funds in a transparent trazable way (which is key to increase donors participation), to funding social entrepreneurs or actually creating a prototype of a financially inclusive ecosystem like Didi (https://www.systemad.org/en/)

What’s the best way to get into crypto?

Buy crypto or even better offer your services or products for crypto. If you are a developer build a simple app that solves a simple problem.

What’s limiting the adoption of Blockchain technology?

I think we need to create bridges between what people knows and this new ecosystem. In that sense stable assets are key. We also need to creates apps that solve problems that people have to day. In the past I spent countless hours explaining why the Web was relevant but my efforts where a drop in the ocean compared to what Hotmail, Gmail or FB did.

Who is your favourite youtuber?

I only see the youtubers my son likes so I’m not good referent 🙂

Blockchain can be stressful. How do you find balance and relax while being a crypto advocate?

I have so many interactions with people and I have to digest so much information that it can be stressful but when I talk to people passionate to learn or to use the technology to change society then my stress goes away and I’m full with hope.

The coolest news this year so far?

The year has just started, I think the best is yet to come

Should we listen to Vitalik Buterin?

Absolutely he is a very smart person and more important somebody with great values. He made and is still making an amazing contribution to humanity.

What kind of impact will quantum computing bring to blockchain?

There are still a few year (around 10) before quantum computing is really a threat to Blockchain and before that the technology will adapt.

Will the token economy rule entertainment thanks to 5G?

I think 5G will change many things in our society like people distribution in rural areas or small town development but I think that’s not the reason why entertainment will be disrupted. The tokenization of everything is unavoidable but not in all cases will change a particular industry as some industries will adapt.

And to finish: what’s your ultimate goal in life?

I want to witness a society that gives human beings equal opportunities, that respects people uniqueness and freedom, so my ultimate goal is to create the infrastructure and the tools for that society to exist.