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[00:00:03] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: By 12, I realized, and I'm very fortunate about that, that my purpose in life was creating a more fair society where people could develop. Now I express it in those words, but help society become like a place where anybody, regardless of where they were born, could develop their full potential.

[00:00:26] Jarrad Hope: Hi, I'm Jarrad Hope, co-founder of Logos, a fully decentralized technology stack that's privacy preserving and politically neutral. Today we're talking to Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar. I'm bastardizing that. Please correct me, but.

[00:00:41] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: No, no, no, you do it perfect. It's a tough last name.

[00:00:46] Jarrad Hope: Yeah, I need to work on that. But you're the co-founder of IOV labs, Rootstock labs, Bitcoin Argentina and many, many more initiatives with an amazing background and history of how you got into this space. So yeah, thanks for joining me and pleasure to chat with you.

[00:01:02] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: My pleasure. My pleasure

[00:01:04] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: To be here.

[00:01:05] Jarrad Hope: Cool. So I'd love to hear, like, how you got into crypto. Like, where did this all start for you? And, you know, how did it lead to the initiatives that you're doing today?

[00:01:15] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Well, I think if if you trace back to the. The true origin is like there's two things that were always present in my life. One was the desire to transform society in a in a place where everybody could develop their true potential, their full potential. And the other thing was technology. It's like I started doing social work with my with my mother at nine, going to the slums in Buenos Aires. And I started programing at 11. And also because I was in touch with technology like very early also in the development cycle in the in the development process of technologies like when I started we had the first home computer. So so I saw the full evolution from home computers to PCs to networking, you know, VVS and then into the internet. And I was one of the pioneers of the, of the dotcom. I was the first webmaster for the main newspaper in Argentina in 1996. So,

[00:02:31] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: So in a way, I live one one cycle of innovation around the web and the dotcom in full because I started 1996, I even was part of one IPO in in Nasdaq. In, in 2000. And then I saw the collapse. No. And then the, the rebirth of Of the web. You know, almost ten years after when social networks started to emerge, also mobile devices and and right at that, like new blossoming of of the web is when I got in touch with, with bitcoin, you know, first in 2011. And then I didn't realize its true potential right there. But

[00:03:23] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Then in 2012, a very good friend of mine, Wences Casares like, brought me back into it. It's like he, he shared and and in a way, I was always after the web days where we had a lot of when I started, I had a lot of hope put into the web. I thought the web was going to transform society to be a better place, a more like you know, egalitarian or, you know, like improve Opportunities, and I think it did, but but not in the full,

[00:03:59] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Dimension of the human development. No. And later, when I got in touch with Bitcoin, I had this experience with Wences around Bitcoin. I realized that what we were missing. Now I have words to put it. But in the web,

[00:04:15] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: This is like in the web we were transforming communication information. But we were not touching how value was handled and managed in the society. So what we were missing was that dimension. And

[00:04:30] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: And when I saw Bitcoin at the beginning, the experience, I shared that many times. But it was like Wednesday. It was in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. I was in Buenos Aires. We had capital controls in in Argentina, and it was impossible to get. Well, not impossible, but very expensive. Like it was taking me like one month, and I was losing 10% of the value that I was collecting from my customers. I had a software factory back in the day from Europe and the US because the payment

[00:05:05] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Systems.

[00:05:05] Jarrad Hope: Was this? Sorry. What year was this? Around. What decade?

[00:05:08] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: To 2012. So,

[00:05:11] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: So but I was doing it for a couple of years now. It was before Bitcoin.

[00:05:17] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: I was using a bunch of hopes hopes between, you know, banks in Europe to PayPal to banks in the US. So it

[00:05:28] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Was a mess. It was very cumbersome. And then we had the capital controls in Argentina. And when we we had this experience with Wences, he he made me open an account in Blockchain.info that was like a pioneer platform. It was a web wallet. And then he sent me 5000 bitcoins, which at the time were like SDK. No, it was still

[00:05:54] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Very relevant. I mean, it's now it's much more, but at that time was still a relevant amount of money

[00:06:00] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: And, and and then I sent them back. He, he told me to keep one and and then when I checked my balance, I had 0.9995 instead of one. And then I said why? And then I realized I was paying for the transaction. So even the cost of the operation of the system was fully transparent, and the whole process didn't require authorization from anybody. It was, you know, the two of us, like thousands of miles away exchanging value. And then I that was the my moment where I said, yeah, this is how they I call it the internet of value now. But this is how a truly free financial system which embodies the same principles we were thinking for the web in terms of information and communication should look like. And then while I was like 15 days nonstop doing all sorts of like reading mostly about the financial aspects, because I come from a tech background. So, so I needed to read about the history of money Bretton Woods, how how the financial architecture of the world works and, and understanding all those dimensions. And I kept studying for two years more 2 or 3 years more like every day, taking a new concept from the financial system until I managed to understand the, the full picture. So yeah, that's that's how I started.

[00:07:37] Jarrad Hope: You're right. That's amazing. I mean, so I guess, like thank you for that. And like, obviously the journey is continued on from there, but rewinding back to, like, you know, these core desires of like transforming to society, like and helping people reach their full potential. Like, where do you think that comes from? Does that come from your your mother's work at all? Or like, is that something that you were

[00:08:00] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Yes.

[00:08:00] Jarrad Hope: Born with? Do you think

[00:08:01] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Yes.

[00:08:01] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: It comes from those experiences, I think. Of course. My mother like if you want, like expose me to to the realities and but there are certain experiences I had that were like instrumental in, in in who I am

[00:08:21] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: And.

[00:08:21] Jarrad Hope: Talk about them at all

[00:08:22] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Yeah.

[00:08:22] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Yeah, absolutely. It's like you know, I saw people like the person who was living in the slums, the you cannot get into the slums without somebody from the place that will help you and open the doors because, you know, they usually those are environments where people is they don't trust by definition, because they have been abused Multiple times by external

[00:08:49] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: People, foreigners, people who wants to take advantage of them. So usually they are very reserved and they have a if you want a web of trust, you know, in

[00:08:59] Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar: Among them. And that's how it works, is somebody needs to open the and the leader in the slums, he he was like an amazing person from as a human being very smart. No, no education. But he was like like creating his own building methods, like creating panels with cement and and steel frames and things like that. He was creating from, from scratch out of his own inventive and and and and what I saw is like he, he could not prosper because basically he he didn't have the, the means to But he was a person that had all the attributes you would expect from a human being in terms of like ingenuity solidarity. He was helping always the community. He was an amazing person. And I think from his perspective, he he had a very fulfilled life. He's not that that this was you know, I don't think he was a victim. But at the same time, I felt that as an injustice. It's like

Jarrad Hope talks to ⁠Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar⁠, Chairman and Co-founder at IOVLabs and co-founder of ⁠Rootstock.io⁠, about his lifelong mission to create an equitable society by integrating technology and social work. He believes that Bitcoin can transform society by establishing a peer-to-peer monetary system, merging his passion for technology with social transformation, particularly in financially unstable regions such as Latin America. By collaborating with governments and NGOs, Diego aims to scale and implement decentralized digital trust frameworks, ensuring financial inclusion while preserving individual freedom.

<p>Logos Podcast is a bi-weekly interview show about building sovereign communities: the people, philosophies, challenges, and solutions. We invite the world's foremost experts and radical thinkers to discuss how to emancipate from repressive systems through new social, political, and economic institutions.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>

Logos Podcast is a bi-weekly interview show about building sovereign communities: the people, philosophies, challenges, and solutions. We invite the world's foremost experts and radical thinkers to discuss how to emancipate from repressive systems through new social, political, and economic institutions.

Jarrad Hope

Logos Podcast

<p>Jarrad Hope talks to <a href="https://x.com/dieguito">⁠Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar⁠</a>, Chairman and Co-founder at IOVLabs and co-founder of <a href="http://Rootstock.io">⁠Rootstock.io⁠</a>, about his lifelong mission to create an equitable society by integrating technology and social work.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>He believes that Bitcoin can transform society by establishing a peer-to-peer monetary system, merging his passion for technology with social transformation, particularly in financially unstable regions such as Latin America.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>By collaborating with governments and NGOs, Diego aims to scale and implement decentralized digital trust frameworks, ensuring financial inclusion while preserving individual freedom.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>