Ethereum, Everywhere (All at Once) — Santiago Palladino at Devconnect Argentina

A talk by Santiago Palladino at Ethereum Day during Devconnect Argentina 2025, exploring how Ethereum's decentralization ethos extends far beyond the technical and financial, shaping communities around the world and in Argentina in particular.

This transcript is an accessible copy of the original video transcript (opens in a new tab) published by Ethereum Foundation. It has been lightly edited for readability.

Growing up far away (0:07)

Santiago Palladino: Thank you, Binji. Thanks all of you for being here. It's an absolute honor being here on stage and even more of an honor having Devconnect here in Buenos Aires.

I'm going to piggyback on some of what Isabelle and Mariano have already been talking about, and I'm going to start with a personal anecdote. No, this anecdote is not going to be about money or financial struggles—it's going to be about something a little more personal.

When I was a kid, there was this show on TV called Beakman's World. It was about a mad scientist who would explain science to kids using wacky experiments with a rat as a sidekick. It was plenty of fun, and the nerd in me really loved it. Every episode they would put up a slide saying, "If you want to send your questions to Beakman, just send a letter to this address." Yes, this was letters—email didn't exist back then. I'm old, sorry.

I remember going to my parents one day and asking, "Can I send a letter? Can I participate in the show?" And they said, "Honey, these are reruns. Haven't you noticed it's the same episodes over and over again? This is a show that aired in a completely different part of the world years ago. It's not something you can participate in."

That was the first time I can remember it hitting me that I was somehow apart—far away from the world, from the media I was consuming. There was a barrier I couldn't cross.

As the internet came along, this was consistent. For those of you from the US or Europe, you might not be too familiar with these screens, but it was very common to see content you couldn't access—"Hey, this is happening, but sorry, you're not in a civilized enough country to see it." Mandatory XKCD here. The fact that just because I was sitting at a computer in a different location—even though it was the same computer connected to the same internet—I was cut off from it. It was infuriating.

It goes a little beyond that. It's not just how I could access the world, but also how the world reflected back at us—how we saw ourselves portrayed in mass media. I'm not going to pick on the blatant errors from Hollywood movies—actually, yes I am. A two-minute Google search would have told them those places are not real, for Christ's sake.

The recurring trope we'd see is Argentina as a place to escape—a place so far away that you can start over and reset. Whether it's the Simpsons episode where Bart randomly dials Buenos Aires and Hitler picks up, or someone in a troubled romantic relationship who flies to this far-away exotic place and finds herself with a Spanish-speaking singer on a tropical beach, or a location that those of you who have visited downtown know doesn't actually exist—it's just a mishmash of other locations. The recurring message: Argentina is far away, so far away that it's where you reset, where you start over, where everything is wiped clean.

That quote is from a Dexter episode years ago. I actually went into the Dexter wiki to try to find it and found this beautiful description: "Argentina is a location in a show." Oh, and by the way, it's also a real place—just so you guys know.

Decentralization as a feature (4:47)

Santiago Palladino: So we're far away, we're cut off. And by far away I don't just mean geographically—as most of you who traveled here have endured on the plane. Hey, it's payback time—we always have to deal with this when we go somewhere else.

My point is: being so far away, so cut off from the rest of the world, I think it's no wonder that when we found a technology where decentralization is not a bug but a feature—that it's an asset—we jumped into it.

A decade of Argentine crypto (5:27)

Santiago Palladino: Now that I've given you some context of where I'm coming from, I want to talk about two things. One, shill what Argentinians have been doing in crypto for these past ten years or more. And also go through the different people, different profiles, different backgrounds that we need to build Ethereum. The point I want to drive home is: we need diversity in Ethereum. We need geographical diversity. We need different areas of expertise, different domains. We need as many people to jump in to build what we want to build.

Let me start with a bit of history. Ethereum history in Argentina starts around 2012, and it starts with Bitcoin—for a very simple reason: there was no Ethereum yet. The organizer for the Bitcoin meetup was Wences Casares, who eventually went on to found Xapo. He would be joined by Ripio and SatoshiTango a couple of years later, around 2013–2014. Then other major exchanges like Buenbit, Belo, and Lemon came along—all Argentine founders.

Bitcoin meetups would eventually lead to the formation of the Bitcoin Argentina NGO, which organized laBITconf—one of the greatest Bitcoin conferences in the world. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago. It would even lead to the development of non-financial applications on Bitcoin—the screenshot there is from Proof of Existence, built by local developer Manu.

I'm going to pick on Manu for a second because he's also the guy who founded Voltaire House, a co-working space out of which many of the early Ethereum projects came. It's also dear to my heart because it's where I met crypto. I found myself in Voltaire one day almost by chance. I remember sitting next to this guy and saying, "Hey, nice to meet you. I'm Pala. I work on web—well, not web2, because it was just the web, right? There wasn't another web yet. What do you do?" And he told me, "Oh, I work on smart contracts on Ethereum." And—what the hell?

Out of Voltaire, some of the most recognizable Argentine projects emerged: OpenZeppelin, Decentraland, Nomic Labs—who are the guys behind Hardhat—and the Muun wallet for Bitcoin. But these are just the ones that started. The Argentine ecosystem is now a lot bigger than that, and I'm sorry for all the teams I'm missing from this slide. What I want to drive home is that Argentina has given the crypto ecosystem many major projects. And even for projects not on that list, pretty much every team has an Argentinian in them if you look close enough.

The rate of web3 to web2 developers in Argentina is almost three times that of the US. Even at Aztec Labs, one in six engineers is Argentinian—and I'm talking about a company created in the UK. We love web3. We are naturally drawn to it. I think the reasons are half of what Isabelle mentioned in her talk during this event, and also this feeling of being cut off and finding in Ethereum a place where we can build, where we can thrive, and where we're welcome.

Infiltrating the ecosystem (9:37)

Santiago Palladino: Let me share a few more anecdotes—again, not about money, but about the kinds of things that these Argentinians who've infiltrated the web3 ecosystem have been building. For me, my first experience in web3 was auditing a smart contract language—Serpent. If you haven't heard of it, it's because we destroyed it.

Coming from ten years of professional development and all of a sudden landing in an ecosystem where something I did from an office fifteen minutes from this venue would end up having a direct impact—where the guy who created the technology would publicly say, "Do not use this language anymore"—there was a very direct reach that I could have from this corner of the world on this global technology being built at the time.

The security community here in Argentina is incredible. There have been major critical vulnerabilities spotted by Argentinians in ENS—that one is from Red Guild, one of the most underappreciated teams in security in the whole ecosystem, if you ask me. These guys are fantastic. Also Argentinians spotting critical attacks on MakerDAO, or even a supply chain attack on SMS that was leading to the theft of hundreds of Telegram accounts. By the way—daily reminder: do not use SMS for 2FA.

Standards and infrastructure (11:17)

Santiago Palladino: We also contributed a lot to standards. My first five years in crypto were at OpenZeppelin. I had the chance to build the ERC-721 contract along with a guy who's sitting right over there, and Facu as well. That code would eventually power the NFT craze a couple of years later—it was written from here.

There are over twenty Ethereum improvement proposals authored by Argentinians. Granted, half of them are just by Fran—but still, that counts. And a smart contract library written and originally maintained by just two Argentine developers—Nico and Fran—nowadays handles over $200 billion in assets. All of that code, originally maintained from here.

If you have interacted with any of these protocols, know that you have most likely interacted with contracts deployed from Argentina, by someone sitting at a computer around here. As Mariano was saying a couple of minutes ago in his own talk, Dai deployment actually happened from an apartment in Almagro, a neighborhood half an hour from here.

And that's just without counting all the local teams I already mentioned. We just heard a couple of minutes ago about all the things the Lambda team is building, including their own execution environment—there are nodes on the Ethereum network right now that are powered by code written here. And contracts built using frameworks also developed by Argentine developers—Hardhat has a third of a million dependent projects on GitHub.

We also like to bring a bit of ourselves to our contributions. Mariano skipped this one, but one of his most significant hackathon projects was Salo DAO—a smart contract for bribes. You could literally buy his voting power via smart contract. And yes, what you see there is a statue honoring bribes. It's on Nueve de Julio, not too far from here. There is a public building with a statue on the side—a statue that honors bribes. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

All of this is compiled in a beautiful initiative by the Crecimiento team. You can check out their website—it has a massive timeline of all contributions from Argentinians to Ethereum and crypto in general. And to piggyback on something Mariano said a couple of minutes ago: I probably overindexed on things that happened a few years ago—maybe an artifact of me being an old guy by now—but there is a new generation. New developers flowing in, putting so much energy into the ecosystem. It's beautiful. It's inspiring.

They're also making major contributions. I want to stop on one. Yesterday there was the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress on privacy. On the main stage, Vitalik was demoing Kohaku, the new privacy wallet. An hour later, on the secondary stage—almost hidden on the top floor—there was a panel that included one of the developers actually building Kohaku, who is Argentinian and works a couple of blocks from here.

Bringing Ethereum home (15:07)

Santiago Palladino: But all of these contributions, all of these things that Argentina brings to web3—they weren't enough. We wanted to do more. We wanted to bring Ethereum here. And spoiler alert, since you're sitting here—yes, we succeeded.

This all started in 2018 with ETH Buenos Aires, the first ETH Global community hackathon. It brought hundreds of people from all over the world. Shout out to Martina and Ornella, who organized pretty much the whole thing by themselves. It eventually mutated into meetups that would welcome people like Andreas Antonopoulos, Jenny from Zerion, Jorge from Aragon—people from all over the world coming to a basement in Buenos Aires and joining us in our crazy meetups.

And yes, eventually this led to a talk by Mariano at Devcon 5. The talk was called "Living on DeFi—How We Survived Argentina's 50% Inflation." That number seems cute after having gone to 300% inflation. You've already seen that picture in Mariano's presentation. What he didn't show is that I still have the t-shirt. We actually printed t-shirts saying "Devcon Buenos Aires 2020" to try to meme that into existence. I've saved this for over five years. I'm proud to be showing it now.

Devconnect Buenos Aires (16:34)

Santiago Palladino: We made it. I can't explain how proud, how honored I am that Devconnect finally came here. It's pretty much a dream come true.

I think it makes sense—not just because I love this country, but because it really shows that Ethereum is putting their conference where their mouth is. All these ethos about decentralization are actually being acted upon by hosting the conference here, leveraging the existing talent—which hopefully I've convinced you exists—and also piggybacking on the existing user base. Pretty much one in five Argentinians holds crypto, decentralized or centralized. We can argue for a long time about whether holding crypto on a centralized exchange is actually holding crypto or not, but these are people who already have it, who have already been exposed to it. There's an existing user base for you to tap into and try to ship new things, new products, and see what can be built.

Ethereum for everyone (17:46)

Santiago Palladino: Let me shift gears for a second. I know I've been shilling how awesome Argentina is for hosting an event, for local talent, for everything. But the point I actually want to make is that if Ethereum worked here—in this corner of the world, far apart—it can work everywhere. Argentina is just an example that shows Ethereum is a technology that is truly borderless and can work in any corner of the world.

And if Ethereum can work everywhere, I think it's also worth seeing that it works for everyone—no matter the domain—and everyone is actually needed to build it.

We're at a conference called Devconnect, and "dev" stands for something, so for sure we need developers coding smart contracts, dapps, and whatever have you. But developers need languages to build on—languages specific to smart contracts, languages that bridge other programming languages into the EVM and other chains, that enable privacy features, that support low-level work, that allow formal verification of contracts. That needs specialized skill sets.

Ethereum thrives on tokens. Probably the first contract you learn when you jump into Ethereum is how to write an ERC-20. But tokens need a reason to be. For that we have people who work in incentive design, mechanism design, economics, tokenomics—Ethereum even created a brand-new discipline in tokenomics. Or, if you will, memetics—if you're into coins backed by an emoji.

This is not something that requires massive technical prowess. The creator of Uniswap jumped into smart contracts hardly knowing how to code, and he built quite something. Other major feats in DeFi were not powered by massive technical leaps—they were powered by network effects. Remember the SushiSwap vampire attacks? It was literally the same codebase, just with different incentives.

We've gone through NFTs—NFTs that went from status symbols to the way artists can express themselves onchain. They were one of the main things that made it into mass popular culture.

We've had experiments in social coordination and governance. The DAO was pretty much one of the first big things in Ethereum. We've built toolboxes for creating new governance schemes—experimenting with them, trying to rally people around all kinds of causes, whether it's public goods funding or buying the US Constitution for whatever reason.

We also need people who bridge the gap toward the more traditional world. Danny Ryan was talking this morning specifically about this—which, like it or not, is needed if we want real-world Ethereum adoption.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the cypherpunks. I picked Flashbots for this because I really love the approach they took. For those who don't know, Flashbots works around MEV—maximal extractable value. What these guys did was realize there was value being extracted by miners back at the time, and they democratized it. They illuminated the dark forest, in their own words, and built the tools so that anyone could participate in that value—not by requiring a massive amount of money or compute or network, but just by having the knowledge. It was truly a democratization of access.

We need people in security. Web3 security is so much more important than in web2—and the payouts are different. Microsoft nowadays is paying $40K for a critical remote code execution vulnerability. Part of the reason security is so important in web3 is that we get hacks pretty often.

We also need cryptographers. Cryptographers don't just enable new possibilities like SNARKs for privacy and zero-knowledge rollups—cryptography is at the core of Ethereum. Blobs are powered by KZG commitments. BLS signatures power the consensus network.

Node operators run the network, actually executing the software where our protocol lives. And last but not least, we need the researchers—the core teams who are pushing forward the evolution of the protocol itself. Remember the Merge—we moved from proof of work to proof of stake, all while keeping 100% uptime. This is amazing.

All of this was powered by a very diverse group of people. If you just pick a group of developers—and I myself am a developer—we cannot build this.

The Aleph (23:59)

Santiago Palladino: I know this is probably not popular to say at a conference called Devconnect, but my point is: Ethereum is a technology meant to run everywhere and meant for everyone—to be built by everyone, from every background, from every place in the world.

With the one minute I have left, I want to pick a quote from Jorge Luis Borges. The Crecimiento team picked Aleph as the name for their co-working space, and I think it's a very good metaphor—it applies here to Devconnect as well. The Aleph, in Borges' story, is a point in space that contains every single other point—beyond space, beyond time. And I think that's what we have here: 15,000 people interested in this technology, all together, all in the same space, with the capability to build something new.

What I ask you to do during these days is to connect with other people. Gather feedback on what you're building. Try to find partners, builders, users, investors. Get out of your bubble, out of your comfort zone, and talk to as many people as you can. Meet new people, interact with new people. Remember that innovation thrives on diversity—whether it's geographical, from backgrounds, or from ideologies. Connect, build together, and enjoy this week. Thank you.

Q&A (25:35)

Binji: That was incredible. Thank you so much. I think you covered pretty much everything around Ethereum—the culture, the technical properties—all in one talk. That's very impressive. I don't think I've ever seen someone do all of that in one go. So, a couple of questions. The one I found most interesting—especially when you talk about use cases—what is something you would like to see get built on Ethereum that hasn't been built yet?

Santiago Palladino: That's a very good question. I want to see something as far away from payments and finance as possible. I think we overindex on financial applications, and Ethereum is so much more than that. It's a coordination layer—for social experiments, for building different kinds of trust and networks of people. I want to see more stuff built around that, with a stronger focus on community as opposed to strictly money.

Binji: What's great is you're one of the few people I've seen who have gone through all the different routes of Ethereum—you're onchain, you talk about NFTs, you're doing deep cryptography. What was it that clicked for you? Was there a specific moment where you said, "I have to dedicate my life to this"?

Santiago Palladino: I think it was the very first moments of tinkering with the tech. This was early 2017 and everything was so broken. Nothing worked. You wanted to compile something, deploy something—the entire toolchain was a mess. And at the same time, it clearly had a lot of potential. It had everything to be huge. That's when I wanted to jump in. I said, "We need to put things in order, we need to make this available to build something bigger, and now is the time to jump in and steer it in the right direction."

Binji: Switching to Argentina—would you recommend web3 founders come or move to Argentina?

Santiago Palladino: Move to Argentina? Existing founders, for sure—visit Argentina at the very least. Moving is a very personal life decision, and I don't want to get into that. But aside from being a beautiful country with a lot to see, it's a place where crypto adoption is more real, more honest—where crypto is actually used. Isabelle made a much better case around the economics than I did. But I think genuine adoption leads to a genuine user base to actually build something from.

Binji: Totally. I've been remote working my entire life, and the Aleph co-working hub was the only place in my entire time in crypto where I could be in a room and everyone's working in crypto. I don't think there's another place in the world that comes close. Speaking of users—do you have an ideal set of users or people in the world that you wish were more into crypto?

Santiago Palladino: Apart from a group of friends from high school, I guess. But speaking seriously—I would like pretty much everyone to be into it, but at the same time not "into it" in the sense that I don't want crypto to be visible front and center. For us, it's an ethos—we build around it. But for regular people, for mass adoption, it should be just another tool. I don't want people thinking about whether their bank stores their funds in an Oracle database or SQL. I want crypto to be transparent to people.

Binji: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Santiago Palladino: Thank you. See you.