Six months after quitting the nine to five.
Three minutes with a blockchain developer from Argentina, filmed on the road and starting with a small misunderstanding. The interviewer opens with the channel’s exclamation and has to explain it: “That’s what we like kind of say to exclaim at the end of our content.” Once that lands, the interview starts properly.
“Hola, soy Tomás de Argentina”, he says, gives his age as twenty seven, and puts the change in one sentence: “Six months ago, I quit my nine to five job and I went all in building in blockchain.” What he quit into is a startup, “we are creating a startup called Aqua Zero”, building with 1inch and Uniswap as partners, and the pitch is a repair job. “Liquidity pools today are so broken. So we are making them more efficient.” The fix he describes is a shared pool: “you put your assets and you can provide liquidity to multiple pools in multiple chains simultaneously”, and when a trade comes in the liquidity is injected just in time, “the swap executes, and then the liquidity goes back to the shared liquidity pool, ready for the next swap in any pool, in any chain.”
Asked why he is excited to be where he is, he answers with Ethereum and with home. “I am really, really, really bullish on Ethereum”, partly because he thinks “Ethereum is playing like the long-term game” with brokers and stablecoins, and partly because of Argentina, where he says the country has been “having a lot of inflation the last years”. His conclusion is not ideological, it is practical: “our economy is so broken that we need to find a solution for that, and we find it in stablecoins, in Ethereum.”
The advice for anyone starting is short. “Just enter, come here, build, go to hackathons”, because “hackathons is the best place that you can find and you can learn how to build, not just a video on YouTube.”
Asked the closing question, “what do you feel like is the biggest thing everyday people don’t get about crypto?”, he names the wording rather than the technology. “I feel that there’s like a language gap with like normal people.” Talk about liquidity pools and lending and people get frightened off, he says, while what they are missing is that “a bank will not take your funds off you.” His answer to that is education, and then, on request, one more booyah.