Libraries have always served communities - providing access and reference to resources and value. In some places, library cards serve as a stop-gap tool for supporting under-documented community members with much more than access to books. What if library cards could also be used as credit cards and provide an onramp to financial services?
Many of the challenges in this concept are similar to those faced in the emerging blockchain & crypto-currency world. How might we provide safer onramps into modern financial products like credit scores and banking, and how might libraries fit into this model? What mistakes can we avoid, both from news-grabbing headline disasters, and from more subtle issues related to financial equality and inclusion evidenced in blockchain communities?
In this discussion we bring together a panel of global experts who have leveraged traditional economics, modern cryptography, some clever fintech, and a dedication to legal and ethical awareness to analyze these issues. Participants will also have an opportunity to brainstorm with internationally recognized scholars.
After the meeting the Aragon dTech team will lead a “hands-on” meta-mask wallet, NFT, and BrightID experience for all participants interested in learning more.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this class, students will be able to:
Describe the benefits modern financial tools provide (and some of the risks)
Deliver an overview of technologies including decentralized IDs, the W3C, and blockchains; IPFS for content-based addressing; and smart contracts, NFTs, and fun(ny) money
Explain how to connect to legal resources to help answer modern questions in the financial field
Instructors
Anson Parker is a Center for Civic Innovation 2021 fellow and project coordinator. He has 25 years of open source open data development, primarily in the library and archive space.
Gerardo Lemus is the founder of Chelo Finance, which builds financial tooling focused on bringing macro-economic efficiencies to micro-economic realities using a modular approach to development and focused engagement in real-world value. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from MIT, as well as 20+ years of experience in traditional Financial Markets as strategist, portfolio manager and consultant at Investment Banks (J.P. Morgan, Citigroup) and Hedge Funds (Rubicon). He has been a Data Science Consultant to crypto market makers since 2018. He is also a wine lover, with a WSET level 3 certification.
Charles Naut is the founder of Raincards, a modern fintech product that bridges blockchain to Visa and facilitates regulated, convenient, auditable transactions.
Daniel Nemet is a European Union Crypto Initiative (EUCI) advisor and ecosystem developer. EUCI is the EU’s oldest legal advisory group focused on the web3 and crypto-economics space. He is also a researcher and designer at Lexon Technologies. His work involves Lexon, a next-generation plain text programming language, and human-readable smart contracts transpiled to Solidity, running on EVM. He is the founder of HUN-1 DAO, the first Hungarian national DAO focusing on education, acting as a local web3 field catalyst; he is also a board member on four EU and HUN NGOs focusing on youth culture and human resilience.
Will Ruddick is the founder of Grassroots Economics, and an expert in local DIY economics. For over 10 years, and long before the blockchain craze hit the news cycle, he and his team have helped hundreds of thousands of Kenyans use custom currencies to improve economies.
Kyle Smith is a LexDAO legal schema expert, and the founder of LexDAO Clinic, which uses a Web3 modified version of the student + supervisor services model common in law school to offer legal aid to impact DAOs and other manual labor, while also helping teach law students important practical skills. He was inspired to found LexDAO’s Clinic after his experience as a supervisor at Western Law’s Community Legal Services, where he helped marginalized communities access basic legal services. He is a certified legal engineer and a core contributor at LexDAO.
Adam Stallard is Project Lead for BrightID, a non-biometric identification tool designed to help provide security and proof-of-humanity in the ecosystem.
