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# System prepended metadata

title: Buenos Aires Lunch

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# Buenos Aires Lunch
The following intends to shed some light on the attendees of the lunch at Buenos Aires in the context of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy.

## Pablo Larguia - SenseiNode
Pablo is the Founder and CEO of [SenseiNode](https://www.senseinode.com/), a Node provider service based in Latin America. They want to expose the region to running more infrastructure services, and try to place themselves in that direction.

> Pablo is the organizer of this lunch.

- What are we doing together
    - They currently run validators on Kusama (1KV program) and Polkadot. However their nodes are still not in the elected set, specifically on Polkadot.
    - Testing of their archive node service to be consumed by our data team as part of our infrastructure.
    - They run nodes for the W3F.
    - We started discussions with them about creating a one-click deployment service for para{chains,threads}. This would be a treasury proposal.
- What they might ask
    - The main objective they are pursuing now is how to get more involved and become more known in the Polkadot Ecosystem. Therefore they want support on their nodes to become part of the elected set, and they are also looking into vote delegation on OpenGov to become representatives of Latin America.
- General Info
    - Twitter: https://twitter.com/pablolarguia
    - Website: https://www.senseinode.com/


## Nacho Roizman - SenseiNode
Nacho is the Founder & COO of [SenseiNode](https://www.senseinode.com/), a Node provider service based in Latin America. They want to expose the region to running more infrastructure services, and try to place themselves in that direction.

Same info on what we are doing or what they can ask than Pablo.

- General Info
    - Twitter: https://twitter.com/nachoroizman
    - Website: https://www.senseinode.com/


## Fran Landino - Lemon
Fran is the Blockchain Director at [Lemon](https://www.lemon.me/en), a centralized service that allows people to hold tokens (custody reminds on lemon side, as a CEX), and spend them with a Visa Debit Card. This service became extremely popular in Argentina as it allowed users to escape inflation by leveraging on this service, specially on Stablecoins. 

Currently, Lemon has 1.7 MM users in Argentina, and are now starting this service in Brasil.

> We would very much like to have Lemon become a parachain on Polkadot as a long term strategy, to bring their users into our network.

- What are we doing together
    - We are currently just having intial conversations with them.
    - In the past we engaged with them to have them build their own parachain. Technically they were not there, but we also failed at following up thoroughly with them. In the end, they decided to launch an NFT collection on Polygon: [Lemmy's](https://opensea.io/es/collection/lemon-nation) are the avatars for users on Lemon, so they give an NFT to each user (which they can't sell or do anything with them). Currently Lemon has a commercial agreement in place with Polygon: they placed some development milestones on Lemon and if Lemon reaches them, they give them MATIC tokens.
    - Lemon offers DOT as one of their tokens to users, and currently has a very low volume of 180k USD in DOT.
- What they might ask
    - The team is thinking about transitioning to a full Web3 solution in the future. Ultimately, they always had as a goal to allow users to soft landing with their current non-custody solution, to then onboard them on full custody solution.
    That said, they are looking into Polkadot vs Cosmos vs [Polygon Supernets](https://polygon.technology/supernets) and they might be interested in our take on that. One particular topic they are interested in is [Account Abstraction](https://blog.pantherprotocol.io/ethereum-account-abstraction-everything-you-need-to-know/).
    
- General Info
    - https://www.lemon.me/en
    - [this guy](https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E03AQEn5YYToQ5kXw/profile-displayphoto-shrink_800_800/0/1543973943053?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=hHZcLgCaIq6tXdf54l5wHpIdbI4OJUlaJCTybN7tYzk)

## Rafa de Ambrosi - Belo
Rafa is COO at [Belo](https://www.belo.app/), a direct competitor of Lemon. Currently have a lower market penetration than Lemon, but still did very well by being more agressive on BTC cashabak while using the card (lemon has the same, but lower %).

- What are we doing together
    - Currently not doing anything together, this would be the first engagement with them.
- What they might ask
    - As this is the first engagement, not sure yet.
- General Info
    - https://www.belo.app/
    - Belo Org chart: https://theorg.com/org/belo/org-chart/rafael

## Ariel Scaliter - Agrotoken
Ariel is the CTO at [Agrotoken](https://agrotoken.io/). Together with Sensei Node, the team we are in the most advanced conversations with. Agrotoken is tokenizing crops, allowing users to have liquidity out of their harvest. They started tapping into this market in Argentina and are expanding to Brasil. Last year they tokenized assets for 60MM USD, and their objective is to get to 1B USD this year. Their stronghold comes from having high expertise on how the market works, and trying to tap into it without necesarilly changing the entire process.
They also have a Visa card by which users can spend their tokenized crops, i.e. buying a coffee with tokenized soy. They already have partnerships with big agro companies of the like of Cargill.
Agrotoken has currently developments on Ethereum, Polygon and Algorand. In fact, Algorand is currently investing on Agrotoken.

- What are we doing together
    - Agrotoken currently has two developers at the academy. This was part of the agreement to migrate them over to Polkadot, and has definitely served that purpose.
    - We are working on a plan on building their parachain. Three potential pathways that we are scoping:
        - Build an EVM compatible chain where they can deploy their contracts, and then sequentially migrate towards native substrate.
        - Build an Oracle (that they need) as a first project and then go from there. CTO is not there with this, as he does not want us to work on a POC but rather go full into the solution.
        - Build everything natively on Substrate.
    - They don't only want development help, but also BD help (i.e.: they want assistance on building their own SBP).
- What they might ask
    - As we met together yesterday, not much they could ask. Maybe curious on resource needs to build a parachain so that they can plan for it.
    - We could potentially use them to tell others why they chose Polkadot.
- General Info
    - https://agrotoken.io/
    - https://twitter.com/aricoin1

## Andres Fleischer - Ripio
Andres Fleischer is Ripio Ventures Managing Partner, but [Ripio](https://www.ripio.com/ar/) is a very big exchange in Latin America, with currently around 3MM users.
The last announcement on their end was that they were going to launch a side chain to Ethereum: https://decrypt.co/104764/argentinian-crypto-exchange-ripio-to-launch-ethereum-sidechain-web3-wallet

- What are we doing together
    - Currently not doing anything together, this would be the first engagement with them.
- What they might ask
    - As this is the first engagement, not sure yet.
- General Info
    - https://www.ripio.com/ar/

## Torsten Stüber 
Torsten is the CTO at Pendulum chain, a parachain on both Polkadot (Pendulum) and Kusama (Amplitude). Pendulum aims to connect fiat to Polkadot, and therefore it was a good idea to introduce him to some of these people to see if we could leverage their current solution as well. Torsten is currently giving some lectures on the PBA, and was very keen on meeting local people.

- General Info
    - https://pendulumchain.org/