How The LATAM Blockchain Journey Started in 2018

It has been a great ride for me and the LATAM Blockchain team this 2018. We have come a long way from the days we wanted to offer bitcoin ATM solutions in Latin America, traveled to Seattle with no direction to find a supplier and ended taking a detour to San Francisco and attend a NEO devcon. What came out from the devcon was an agreement with Blockchain at Berkeley to offer their educational courses in Spanish. We had no idea how we were going to make money from this, but there we saw value in teaching open source education to an untapped market. It also pushed us to understand the fundamentals of blockchain to be used to find opportunities and gaps we can fill.

Before I tell our story more in detail, I want to share with you the background of the founders. I was born in Cali, Colombia to Argentine parents. My father is a Rabbi, and we moved around quite a lot as a kid, to finally settling in Miami Florida. Jaime Gutt was born in Caracas, Venezuela and moved as a kid to Miami Florida and attended the same high school as I did. We became good friends during our last years in high school and after graduation, Jaime studied abroad in Melbourne, Australia, and I took a gap year in Shanghai, China, and Jerusalem Israel. We stayed in touch for the time being and applied to Yeshiva University to pursue our careers.

While in Yeshiva University, I had a hard time adapting to the so-called “college ladder”, and focused more on starting small businesses on the side. Jaime eventually caught on and many of our conversations revolved around startups and technology. You see, we always had a sense of making an impact in this world, and were willing to take a leap of faith to achieve our goals.

Here is the story of how LATAM Blockchain Solutions was founded, and what 2019 holds for us.

LATAM Blockchain was founded based on a conversation we had at a bar in Manhattan, after a friends birthday party. We were both Seniors at Yeshiva University, Jaime was studying finance, my major was marketing, but both of us had side hustles on the site hustles unrelated to our majors. The conversation took off when we both agreed, none of us wanted to pursue a corporate ladder, and decided to start a company together, this time targeting the Latin American market with blockchain technology. My Colombian roots and Jaimes Venezuelan upbringings made us realize our countries always came late when it comes to technological advancements, could use decentralized/trustless cryptonetworks, and decided to make a difference.

This was back in January, our first idea was to deploy crypto ATMs all across Latin America. Our research showed that many local currencies suffered from hyperinflation, and there was a large unbanked population. We connected with a crypto ATM supplier in Seattle, and decided to fly out there to meet in person, and close a potential partnership. In the meantime, we were invited to the NEO devcon in San Francisco and decided to take a flight out there as well while we were on the West coast. In practicality, what we did made no sense as we hadn’t closed anything with the suppliers in Seattle, we just had a few phone conferences, and some back and forth emails. Even though it didn’t make sense, we had a good gut feeling about this trip.

Seattle & San Francisco

In Seattle, we were hosted by our friend Aaron Landy who is a software engineer at Uber. He took us around the city until we decided it was a good time to pass by the suppliers' office. We were greeted by our contact in the company, but he wasn’t so delighted about our visit and nothing productive came from the trip, yet. We didn’t let our hopes down and took on a proactive attitude before our flight to San Francisco.

We met a lot of interesting people in the crypto space while at the DevCon including the team of Blockchain at Berkeley, a student-run blockchain organization based in Berkeley University. As we returned to NY, our initial idea was to introduce their courses to Yeshiva University but later realized it made more sense to translate and deploy their courses in Spanish. As we were creating Spanish courses, the team of Blockchain at Berkeley introduced us with Fernando Vera, CEO of LumitBlockchain, a Mexican based blockchain consultancy who shared a similar vision to ours. This led to a deal to work together on educating the Latino population about blockchain thus the creation of Academia 21.

Academia 21

Academia 21 launched with a 4-week course on blockchain fundamentals during the summer at the EBC (Escuela Bancaria y Comercial) in Mexico City. We taught blockchain to 40 students and were featured in Infobae (South America’s biggest digital media) and Criptonoticias for our work. Nowadays, Academia 21 is looking to expand to more countries as we work on uploading open source courses to our e-learning platform.

What I love about the blockchain industry, is the ability to network, connect, and collaborate with the leading experts in the field. Our end goal was to offer blockchain powered solutions for Latin companies, but we didn’t know quite yet what industry to tackle in first. Right before our last semester in college started (around August time), we connected with David Ritter, CEO of the Penta Global Foundation.

We were talking about how Latin Americans always fell behind, and how blockchain could help them become more dependant on their skill sets rather than central entities. David mentioned to us about Penta's work in China for their blockchain rice project. You see, there aren’t many use cases aside from cryptocurrencies for blockchain technology that have been deployed as of 2018, but blockchain rice was a functioning project to better the transparency, traceability, and efficiency of the supply chain of rice companies.

LATAM Trace

We saw an opportunity to offer their solutions in Latin America and struck a partnership to promote LATAM Trace, our supply chain blockchain powered solution powered by the Penta Foundation. Our first focus with LATAM trace aligns with the Colombia coffee industry, and plan to expand to more food products and countries in 2019. We are currently talking with some major coffee retailers in the country to offer them our solutions, and are open to working with anyone interested in deploying blockchain powered solutions around Latin America for their supply chains.

As 2019 is about to start, I cannot wait what the future holds for the LATAM Blockchain team. We were invited to the upcoming Yeshiva University innovation lab to pursue our venture, as our goal to create blockchain ecosystems in Latin America continues. We will continue to work hard, form partnerships, inspire fellow Latin/college entrepreneurs, implement blockchain powered solutions and educate others about our industry etc. There is so much room for improvement, we are just getting started.

Last note- Firstly, I want to thank Jaime for withstanding with my crazy ideas. My family, friends, mentors, and anyone that I came across that encouraged me to continue, fail, learn, and keep trying. As you can see, there were no givens for us in 2018, we had a lot of ups and downs along the way; I just laid out a macro summary of the startup. I hope our story inspires fellow college and Latino entrepreneurs to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in 2019. It doesn’t matter if you cannot find a clear path of what you are doing from the beginning or how will you do it. The key is to get started with a hypothesis, test it, and build MVPs. Nothing is certain and If there is a will, there is a way; you just have to believe in something that it will all be worth it in the long run, focus, hustle, be creative and push forward. If you need any help getting started, feel free to reach out!

The journey continues onwards.

By Menajem Benchimol.