I always thought that #bitcoin was a game currency.

Back in Venezuela I had friends that were living a very good life just playing games, selling avatars, skins and accounts with high levels.

I completely ignored the technology as I was working as a field engineer looking for petroleum at Schlumberger (I thought that it was cool because the majority of the engineers had an amazing lifestyle and I was the youngest with 22).

When I had to leave my soil because I got to involved with politics, I didn’t even think about crypto. I was always telling my parents that we had to “buy” USD (we don’t say exchange as everything is black market).

I arrived to France and I focused on tech, I got the opportunity to join @RocketBerlin for @Jumia_Group where I learned a lot about marketplaces and growth strategies in general. My team was amazing, I learned soooo much but sadly nobody told me that crypto was real.

Then moved to Berlin and got to meet a lot of #punks (you know who you are ) while working for an organization funded by @Microsoft matching doctors with patients. One of my friends had a room and he always had amazing people. One of them became my bro and is at the @0xProject.

He really opened my eyes 4.5 years ago, he showed me the tech and I couldn’t believe that 2-3 years before I had friends back in Venezuela telling me about it and I ignored it.

Today 5 years ago exactly, @feindura and @VitalikButerin released a piece of technology that enabled anyone to create their own money, token, currency or shitcoins which accelerated the innovation to another level.

That excited me a lot because my friend told me that we could tokenize and fractionalize real world assets.

My mind was blown and right away started to learn how we could tokenize real estate. I worked on that few years and realized that sadly wasn’t ready for the masses.

The concept of the DAO was still in my mind. I thought that it was really cool that we could bring people together and govern collectively (I hated the term collective and community because I had flashbacks with what happened in Venezuela).

Then, many great projects came to live ( @AragonProject, @joincolony, @daostack) and that’s when I decided that the technology was being built and that I should focus on building with communities that shared my values.

The Ethereum community has been my family since then. I couldn’t wait every year to go to Devcon, see my friends again, listen to cool tech that inspired me soooo much and obviously party like a rockstar.

During this ride I met amazing friends that have been teaching me so much about building with the community @Meta_Cartel, @MetaFam, @commonsstack @ETHBerlin humans ( @MPtherealMVP @thegrifft @BlockchainJames @gladstonecallum @petheth @DrewHarding @vengist @eric_rsno @pet3rpan_)

I’m super happy of building together with amazing communities. The one closest to my heart apart from the ones mentioned before are:

@FightPandemics a place for connecting those in need of help with those who can provide it. Over 40k hours have been donated to this initiative.

@API3DAO building transparent and decentralized APIs, infrastructure that is super necessary for our industry.

@tecmns creating the “Token Engineering Commons”. Tools and learnings from different communities that will enable us to build more resilient ecosystems.

We are so far from having a world where there is no human suffering even if we live with so much abundance, however, all the pieces of the puzzle for making a better society are being built.

I’m in debt with life for giving me an amazing family and so many opportunities to grow that I can’t stop fighting evil.

If you are also building for a better humanity, please make some signs that we are “Stronger Together” and we can make a difference.

Much love,
Manu