Hi everyone. Welcome to Orange Hatter. Today you're listening to part four of my conversation with Marina. and I wanna go into what you're doing in El Salvador.

Well, of course. One of the projects that I was working on in the ecosystem was working with Chaincode Labs to help grow their developer ecosystem in, around the world in emerging markets. And so one of the projects that I was supporting with connections, calling people, making sure that it, the project was succeeding, was Kala, which is a program in Africa. Kala is a Bitcoin developer education platform where you are part of some of a program. You get selected as a developer with a certain amount of experience and you go through this open source free and open source program. But in that particular case, they have really great mentors. There's a whole project around it. And so that program selected 14 fellows for their, their program, and it was 14 fellows from across Africa that were selected, and I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was great that this could happen in emerging markets, that this was being created, but I, I also felt the need that, and, and they agreed obviously, that there was a need for this to happen in other places. Right? Thailand, Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, wherever we could invite people to participate like you can, Chaincode has.... Lab has a, an open source project program that you can join. It has lessons that like, it starts like a certain date and you participate and you learn, and then you can become part of the community, right? If you're a developer, so what, what I thought was, well, if El Salvador has the new law where Bitcoin is legal tender and companies are having trouble hiring local talent because the, you know, obviously they, they're programmers but they don't understand Bitcoin or lightning, maybe something that would be really important because obviously, as you may remember, this was a top-down decision where the president suddenly, suddenly announced via Jack Mallers in Miami, that, that Bitcoin was legal tender in the country. It really was not well received by the business community or the country and the TiVo wallet. Even though it was a, an important attempt to make sure that it was massified in the country and accepted, it really didn't come from the ground up the way that Bitcoin is usually grows, or is usually encouraged, peer to peer. There was a, a lot of like negative feelings surrounding it and very politicized. Right? And so you couldn't hire because there was no talent. You couldn't really, the wallet wasn't working. And so most, most of the people's experience with Bitcoin at the time was not a good one. It was, like, okay, the, the TiVo ATM machine ate my Bitcoin or my, my, I can't understand this. So people were, a lot, a lot of them were converting that $30 that the government gave them into dollars directly. They were not keeping the Bitcoin, so, And in any case, the whole talent, part two, right? 10, 10 or so companies moved to El Salvador, but they couldn't hire, so they were importing talent, right? And there's no talent. There's no talent. I don't believe in that. I used to recruit talent for a living. I know that you have to go find them, right? Most people will tell you, okay, talk to this person and that person. But those are the safe choices. Those are not the, the, the grit people, the, the people who are gonna care and go above and beyond because they're fascinated by the, by the technology. You know, it's not like natural, okay, I'm gonna spend 2,000 hours studying about Bitcoin. It's not like if you have a job, if you have a life, you don't, you don't, you're not immediately just gonna jump in and do it. There has to be cer a certain, you know, process or course, or a something available to recruit you to learn about it. Right? Somebody has to tell you, hey, you should, you should do this. And so we created a, a program that is very similar to Kala in the, in the sense of focusing on developers already. Not, there's other programs out there that are teaching you how to download a wallet or teaching you the, you know, the basics about Bitcoin, but this was very focused on technology, right? So developers with over two years of experience in programming, and we started with mastering Bitcoin, which is like a Socratic seminar, and we had 80 students go through that, which we call Proof of Work, right? Who actually does the homework? Who actually does the reading? Who is asking questions? And then we did Mastering Lightning, which is the other book that goes through the Chaincode Labs program. And there we had 30 students who did the homework, who passed our test, who were kept showing interest even though they have full-time jobs. And finally, we, from those 30 students, we made another test. We asked them to, you know, just prove that they wanted to be part of the fellowship. And from there we selected six students who became part of the fellowship program. They are working on a project right now, which I think is really, really, really unique, right? Because for example, Kala in Africa, there's no country like where you can just, okay, here we are, we're gonna use Bitcoin transparently all over the place. You can't really embed it in businesses super easy yet, and yet in in El Salvador, we had that unique difference where it can be embedded in a business because it is legal. And so we decided to partner with a company that is focused in the agro, in agro tech, agro industry business. They are a coffee grower association. I. That, you know, the leader of, of the, of the Coffee Grower Association is Cherito Cafe. Cherito is, has coffees that are called Genesis Block. I mean, he's a Bitcoiner by heart, but he really could, he really had, had, uh, had not integrated Bitcoin or lightning in his payment system. So how does he pay farmers? How do coffee, coffee exporters or, or people in Germany or us paying him how he pays the, the, the coffee growers that entire side of the business. You know, yes, he was enthusiast of business of Bitcoin, but he had not integrated lightning and Bitcoin into his payment process. So what we wanted to do was something that you called Marco Pais, which is a country brand, right? We wanna help him become a country brand of Bitcoin and for El Salvador. So a brand for Bitcoin and a brand for El Salvador by helping him integrate lightning payments into his whole ecosystem. So when, when he buys coffee from the grower in a certain region. He gets his payment immediately through lightning and doesn't have to wait three to four months live in that purgatory of pretend money. Right. Where like, they're gonna pay you, but who knows when? Like, no, it's immediate, it's instant. You get your, your, you know, and you can also pay the different coffee growers, not just one, and then trickle it down with the extra fees. Right. You just. Spread it out and do it very transparently. So that's the project that we're working on. We're gonna be what we call from seed to coffee cup, right? So the process of the payment, the payments is gonna be ex extremely, hopefully streamlined the supply chain of coffee. And again, coffee is a global, a global phenomena, and the goal is because it will be an open source system, any company in El Salvador can copy this payment system that we built for Cherito Cafe or any company, let's say Colombia or Mexico, or who, or Ethiopia, who is fascinated by this, who wants to do this as well, they could potentially do it as well. So it can become a, a brand for Bitcoin and a brand for coffee and a brand for El Salvador. If we can make this succeed, and obviously it's a lot of work, it's gonna be a six month program because our students work full time. So you have to remember that part too, that that is different from other countries and other situations, but it's also legal. So we can do it and we can really not feel like, okay, is this gonna pass the law? Is this gonna get us in trouble with, you know... we have that flexibility and freedom and so that is what the project is trying to do now. That is why right now we're trying to find a partner that really makes sense, where we can, you know, set up a node for the team and set up, you know, the, the, the fee you'd be able to, to, to do fees and payments and, and liquidity on the node. So we're trying to raise about $12,000 for the program. So we can, you know, do workshops that are not just for our fellows, but for other people in the community, you know, and also get the node, get, get the liquidity, start the program going, but only after proof of work, right? We didn't do any fundraising before. We're not asking for money every five minutes. Like there's a lot of programs who are... we chose to really be very careful and only fundraise once. The program really needed it. Right. And once we've proven that the talent was there and that this project was hopefully gonna be so unique that you should support it.

Yeah. And if you can send me the contact info for anybody who listens to this program and wants to reach out to you or to support the fellowship.

Wonderful. Yeah. And I'll send you our wallet for SATs.

Yeah, that would be great. So you had mentioned that, that when it comes to coding and the developers, it's so important to get local talent, and yet we talk about this being a global system and things being open source. Are you specifically referring to just the legal aspect of it or is there something else that, uh, restricts, not restrict, but where having local talent is better than, say, us just exporting talent from North America or Europe or something?

Well, I think learning about Bitcoin really takes time. You know, it's not like a sudden, like, okay, now I'm gonna just program in Bitcoin. Right? It really does take time. And sometimes we underestimate that other people don't have time in the global south. Time is money. They barely are passing back, passing the they, they don't, they cannot. Right? And so it really, like, they say proof of work, proof of work, but. Sometimes we don't have time for it and it, and it's really hard and so that's why it's so important to have programs that are, like, really recruiting abroad. Not just, not just, okay, here it is free. Right? Like go talk to them. Go talk to Bitcoin Guadalajara. Go talk to Bitcoin Ekazi. Go talk to Bitcoin, Guatemala. Go talk to them and encourage them to participate because otherwise they just don't know about it. They don't have time to pay attention, and they're just trying to struggle to survive. Right?

Thanks for joining us today and learning with us today. If the discussion with our guest resonated with you and you would like to dive deeper into the world of Bitcoin, don't miss out on joining the Orange Hatter Women's Reading Club. The meetup link is in the show notes. Also, if there are women in your life whom you think will both enjoy and benefit from learning more about Bitcoin, please share Orange Hatter with them. Until next time, bye!