Hi everyone!

I'm Mercedes, one of the co-founders and co-leads of the Ethereum Venezuela community. My current mission is to explore the intersection of technology and citizenship, with a particular focus on quality education, financial inclusion for LATAM, and human rights.

Currently, I'm working on an idea for a product that emphasizes transparency and digital governance for grassroot activists and NGOs working in complex humanitarian contexts, and I am excited to connect with like-minded individuals during Devconnect to further its development.

I'm attending Devconnect to increase visibility for our community's work and connect with individuals actively building the future of the Ethereum ecosystem. My commitment if I get this travel grant, is to share the knowledge gained from these events with our community and keep on building the future of Ethereum in my country.

If you want to read my story, I've done my best to try and summarize what the past 4 years have been like for me here 👇

My Web3 journey started in 2020 when I volunteered for the Singularity University Caracas Chapter, an organization for which I later became a global ambassador, and alumni of its Exponential Inception Latam program in its 2022 cohort.

As a human rights activist pivoting from a web2 political career during the pandemic, it was a significant motivation for me to learn about web3 applications for scalable solutions across the Latin American region, especially related to topics such as education, governance, financial inclusion, human rights, and ReFi.

This is how I started working as the operations manager for the Trustlines Caracas Community during the pandemic, and later in 2021, became a part of the team of El Dorado, a P2P marketplace focused on financial inclusion across Latam.

Thanks to these experiences and intrinsic motivation, I became the co-lead of the Ethereum Caracas Community, organizing several IRL and online events for the Venezuelan community and ultimately traveling with 12 community members to Bogotá for DEVCON VI in October 2022.

We then decided to rebrand and launch the Ethereum Venezuela Community in December 2022, inspired by other communities across the region and with the idea to unify and provide opportunities for Venezuelans living in Venezuela, and the Venezuelan diaspora.

During the past year, we've focused on building trusted relationships with other projects across the Latin American ecosystem and have hosted (and planning more) IRL events focused on development workshops and community meet-ups, thanks to the funds raised in quadratic funding rounds, a dynamic of which we've gained a lot of insights.

If you've gotten this far across the text, I just want to say thank you for being here! Happy to meet you all in Istanbul 🦄