Argentinian wine and Brazilian timber are just the latest
products being transformed by entrepreneurs building distributed applications
on the ethereum blockchain in South America.
One of Brazil's largest banks recently built a smart contract designed
to automate parts of the process by which a company goes public; a group in
Chile is working to help scale the blockchain using the Inter-Planetary File
System (IPFS); and a team in Nicaragua is building a secure identity system
using Ricardian contracts.
Other than ethereum, what all these projects have in common is a company
in Brooklyn, New York, with a rapidly growing presence across industries and
around the world.
Of about 100 employees scattered across five continents, three
have taken a leadership position to run these diverse projects that push the
limits of how a blockchain can be used.
One of those men was hired by ConsenSys in early 2015 after
spending more than 10 years building financial markets software in his native
Brazil and in New York City. ConsenSys blockchain specialist Daniel Novy tells
CoinDesk he's been surprised by how quickly his country has adopted a diverse
set of ethereum applications.
Having founded Brazilian bitcoin exchange Basebit in 2013, Novy
saw firsthand how in those early days bitcoin's reputation for being associated
with illicit transactions made it difficult to sell the technology to banks.
But he added that the stigma doesn't exist with ethereum, which
is making his job of approaching companies to "sprinkle a little
blockchain on them" much easier.
