# Latam News
The following is a collection of newsworthy activities that happened in Latam. Most of these things are even funded by the treasury already, we talks to the robustnest and openness Polkadot can bring to the region.

- Side Events during Polkadot Blockchain Academy. There where three side events focused on Governance with Gav and Raul, the Future of Polkadot with Shawn and Rob, and a workshop about ink!. In total (pending ink! workshop), there were ~540 people.
- OpenZeppelin is coming to Polkadot. The team is perfoming a security review on ink! to prevent it from having all the attack vectors Solidity has now. The OZ team invited the Parity team to a Happy Hour to get both teams to bond.
- COMMENT: Please discuss if this requires a higher initiative, as currently ~80% of all Smart Contracts on Ethereum are built with Solidity use Open Zepellin. Remember that OZ libraries are downloaded by 200k people per week, and this is a great hook into getting the attention from all Solidity developers!
- LABITCONF: We participated in the panel "How to choose the right Blockchain for my company or project?" being held at Labitconf. (https://www.labitconf.com/agenda)
- Events in Mexico: In the last 4 months of the year 2022, the Mexican community held 3 meetups (August 20, September 24 and December 17), and the Mexican community also participated in the Web3 hackathon organized by Gear Technologies.
- Events in Colombia:In November the community organized a meeting in Colombia (https://www.meetup.com/polkadot-and-kusama-bogota/events/289424039/) and in November Polkadot Latam Day was held, an event of more than 10 hours of Spanish-speaking content.
- Hackathon -> The Polkadot Hackathon Latam had 353 registered participants, 41 projects presented, 28 online sessions, 17 workshops, 8 mentorships and 19 judges. In total, 12 main category winners and 8 bounties were determined, distributing $ 196,000 dollars in prizes. https://twitter.com/PolkadotEspanol/status/1599441885893775360?s=20&t=XE8lO8lF61oPhgympCK7zg https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/1790?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
- Parity team met with local companies to discuss the future of Web3 and potential collaborations. https://twitter.com/SenseiNode/status/1622674463778037763?s=20&t=qxVNMHZnY31s1JT4Ju4Wnw
- COMMENT: We should check with these teams if they want to be mentioned or not.
- Buenos Aires Blockchain Academy
- Overall numbers on the region (taken from [here](https://forum.parity.io/t/conquering-all-latam-users/1161)):
- 

## What competition is doing

- Ethereum has just started [this in argentunma](https://twitter.com/EtherArgentina) after the success of:
- ETH Latam handle: https://twitter.com/ethlatam
- ETH Latam Day with 4000 attendees (https://twitter.com/ethlatam/status/1559324903261671425?s=20&t=-mSSwOSJcFQc_3QWFQdXeQ)
- Buenos Aires announced they will be running nodes for Ethereum on 2023: https://twitter.com/blockworks_/status/1559150231639539714?s=21&t=Q1rstii6kfTjj0XJ1Vegag
- Football players being trasnfered using USDC: https://www.bloomberglinea.com/2022/07/27/transferencia-cripto-giuliano-galoppo-fue-vendido-por-banfield-al-san-pablo-en-usdc/
- USDT is available in Brazil in ATMs: https://tether.to/en/tether-usdt-available-in-over-24000-atms-across-brazil-on-3-november/
- Binance is the main sponsor of Argentina's football tournament: https://www.afa.com.ar/es/posts/la-asociacion-del-futbol-argentino-y-binance-refuerzan-su-alianza-estrategica
- BNBChain partnered with Platzi, one of the largest online educational platforms in the region, to train developers who can work within its ecosystem.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bnb-chain-aims-to-raise-30k-new-web3-developers-across-latin-america-in-2022