Forged by crisis, built to last
This story was originally published as a guest thread on the @Ethereum X profile (opens in a new tab) on November 3, 2025. It has been lightly edited for readability.
A crisis that rewired a generation
Devconnect is coming to Argentina (opens in a new tab) in November. The country has a rich crypto history, so rich that it predates crypto itself.
I'm Santiago Palladino (opens in a new tab), engineer at Aztec (opens in a new tab), based in Argentina—and here’s my take on what makes this country so unique.
For most people of my generation, this story starts in 2001. The financial crisis erupted. The government restricted access to people’s own savings.
This would lead to 20+ years of on and off currency controls, followed by three-digit yearly inflation.
"The seed that would lead [Argentinians] to seek money that's immune to government control or profilgacy was planted in December 2001. [...] It was Monday, December 3, and the Argentine government had published a decree over the weekend prohibiting savers from withdrawing more than $250 or 250 pesos per week, and banning most inernational money transfers. Essentially, it meant people's savings were trapped in the national banking system. It would also suck liquidity from the economy, paralyzing commerce and leaving those in the informaal sector, or about half of the working population, with no earnings. [...]
On December 20, the president resigned. [...] The immediate replacement lasted only a week, and Eduardo Duhalde, who followed, stopped the practice of pegging the peso to the dollar and established a new official exchange rate at 1.4 pesos per dollar, devaluing the currency by 40 percent. All dollar deposits were converted to pesos at the official exchange rate, effectively slashing savings. People still couldn't withdraw their own money."
— From The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo
Stablecoins became a way to access the broader financial system, and to act as a store of value against the continuously depreciating peso.
Now, Argentinians are hard-wired towards dollars.
But when they couldn’t get their hands on any, they looked for anything that resembled them.
From coworking space to crypto frontier
My own journey started with the tech, back in 2017. I serendipitously visited Voltaire House for coworking, and happened to sit next to Manuel Aráoz (opens in a new tab).
“What do you do?”
“I build smart contracts”
“You what!?”
I was pilled.
Casa Voltaire - Source (opens in a new tab).
Voltaire would be the seedbed for many crypto projects, such as OpenZeppelin (opens in a new tab), Decentraland (opens in a new tab), Muun (opens in a new tab), and Nomic Foundation (opens in a new tab).
But these would be just a few of the many projects born and raised in Argentina.
And not just projects.
Argentinian builders can be found all across web3. If you work in a crypto company, there’s a good chance one of us is on your team.
We don’t just use crypto—we build it.
Did you know that Argentina has 2.8x as many active web3 builders as the US, when normalized by total developers?
And that’s just the ones that self-report their location.
Sources: Electric Capital Developer Report (opens in a new tab), GitHub Innovation Graph (opens in a new tab).
Milestones made in Argentina
No wonder this led to many significant events in Ethereum history happening from here.
Few people know that a smart contract language, Vyper’s predecessor, was withdrawn from circulation based on an audit coming out of a house in Argentina.
Or that the ERC721 implementation (opens in a new tab) that enabled the NFT craze of 2021 was written here, three years before.
Or that the deployments of MakerDAO (opens in a new tab) SAI and multi-collateral DAI happened from here, same as Balancer (opens in a new tab) and Aragon (opens in a new tab).
Bringing Ethereum home
We Argentinians are passionate about our country and our culture. And we want others to experience it as well.
So much that we had been pushing to bring Devcon(nect) here for over 5 years.
(yes, the t-shirts below read “Devcon BA 2020”)
For me and many other builders having Devconnect here is a dream come true.
Not only because it shows Ethereum’s commitment to decentralization, but also because we can show the world what we’re made of.
Here we can create a springboard to mass adoption, and make crypto so much more than a store of value, a hedge against inflation, or the means to receive payments.
We can fulfill the promise of the infinite garden. Turn Ethereum to a protocol for human coordination.
Starting here, in Argentina.
"A finite game is played for the purpose of winning. An infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."
~ James P. Carse
Our vision for Ethereum is the Infinite Garden. Ethereum is more than a technology, it is a diverse ecosystem of individuals and organizations that build and grow alongside a protocol. The Ethereum ecosystem wasn't something that was designed by any one individual or organization, but it organically evolved with the support of people who nurture the ecosystem to become more vibrant and diverse.
Ethereum is a protocol for human coordination. Coordination is a game, but not one that is played to win. Coordination is more like tending a garden, where one works only that the garden may continue to thrive.
The Infinite Garden is an embodiment of the spirit of the Ethereum Foundation as one gardener in a vast ecosystem — nurture and grow, but do not control, and continue to play.
