My Experience as an Ethereum Foundation Devcon Scholar in Bogota, Colombia
In October 2022, I had the incredible opportunity to attend Devcon in Bogota, the capital of Colombia in South America. I was selected as 1 of 50 scholars all around the world from hundreds of applications and only 1 of a few Americans.
I have been actively involved in the Ethereum ecosystem for around a year and a half since one of the founders of Ethereum, Gavin Wood, came to one of my UC Berkeley entrepreneurship classes and discussed the origin story of one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrencies. Since last spring, I have been fascinated with Ethereum and have taken the opportunity to apply for scholarships and sponsorships to attend Ethereum conferences like ETHLisbon, ETHDenver and ETHNYC, attend my first NFT conference in NYC and start a DAO called PadawanDAO that raised donations from many prominent blockchain companies and leaders like Vitalik Buterin.
I am currently the co-founder and CEO of Sotira, an analytics, financial tracking and pricing discovery tool for ecommerce sellers and resellers. Sotira helps sellers analyze and compare growth and profitability for their income streams and enables sellers to make informed choices about where to list products. Sotira aims to make running ecommerce businesses as seamless and easy as possible. Sotira is backed by Soma Capital and has received grants from NEAR Foundation, Binance’s Blockchain for Social Good Initiative and Blockchain at Berkeley to explore how NFTs can be used to verify the authenticity and originality of expensive and luxury products that our users are selling and resellers to buyers.
As a founder and builder in the space, Devcon was an absolutely life changing experience. Being able to meet so many other scholars from all around the world was eye opening because it reiterated the fact that Ethereum is a global technology and the ecosystem is far bigger than San Francisco or the Bay Area which is where I have lived my whole life. Ultimately, to promote Ethereum as a currency and to spur adoption all over the world, we must examine its use cases in developing countries, countries with high inflation, corruption or unstable governments. I appreciated that Devcon was in a part of the world that may often be overlooked by people in the United States.
I had conversations with other scholars about every possible application of blockchain and Ethereum from the regulation of NFTs to building and scaling DAOs to choosing which protocols or chains to build on. Being around so many people who were avid fans and believers in Ethereum was really important to me; I felt supported in what I was building and being able to bounce ideas off other scholars was invaluable. I felt like a week of conversations and interactions with Devcon scholars taught me more than any blockchain or entrepreneurship class at my university, UC Berkeley.
One thing that stuck out to me about conversations at Devcon is the importance of prioritizing ethics in blockchain and blockchain for social good. Right now, the inequality gap in crypto is worse than in regular finance and this is a barrier to global adoption. Until we fix the inequality and equity issues in web3, we will never be able to onboard the next billion users.
Moreover, talking about some of the most recently funded web3 companies highlighted the importance of not just building products that are only for developers. I think that there are so many crypto companies that are building niche developer tools that are really only accessible and useful for existing adopters and users of crypto. To bring new, regular people into web3, we need to think bigger and conceive of products that have tangible, real world and everyday applications not just products that make money and help already wealthy people predict the next hot NFT.
Some memorable moments from Devcon 2022:
