The founder of Ethereum invested in the Santiago Siri initiative and then others joined in, multiplying the value of the UBI by 30
By Martin Kanenguiser October 21, 2021 (infobae.com)
Santiago Siri on the left; Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum
Santiago Siri can hardly forget what happened to him this week: the Argentine entrepreneur who promotes a universal digital basic income captured an investment from the revolutionary young creator of Ethereum, Vitálik Buterin.
The founder of the second most important crypto globally after Ether used 50 units, equivalent to about USD 200,000 to buy the UBI (the acronym in English for universal basic income) and then, “burned” them, so that, when reducing the available supply, caused its value to increase immediately 10 times.
But that was not all: after Buterin’s decision, several members of the global community of investors in cryptocurrencies joined this initiative with the same operation and, thus, in their ninth month of life, the UBIs came to operate a record volume close to 36 million dollars in one day.
The initiative to provide a universal digital income with the cryptocurrency ether, to assist poor people without any middleman, was launched earlier this year together with his foundation Democracy Earth and Kleros.
In dialogue with Infobae , Siri detailed from Spain how everything happened, after having expressed his emotion on social networks.
“It was an ordinary week; I went to drop off my daughter at school, my cell phone was without battery and when I charged it I found out that the night before Vitalik made a decision that I would have liked him to make: he took 50 Ether, which is about 200 thousand dollars, and bought 8% of UBI’s total offer; he immediately burned it and that had an impact on the price, which went from 3 to 30 cents “
“But it was even more important that the entire crypto system interpreted that decision by Vitalik as a sign of immense support for the UBI system: the volume that was moved was 36 million dollars, when, at the launch of the project, when there was a stage of initial furor, it moved a million dollars ”.
“From this, many people were able to donate money to their parents, travel or pay for their studies. Now that we have a community, it is a very strong push, since the 10,000 users were benefited by the support of Vitalice, with the message that universal income does not have to imply begging the State, but rather an issue that is resolved in technological terms. This week, he gave us an example of how new possibilities can be generated for this project, ”he said.
In this regard, he explained that the ex-wife of Elon Musk and mother of his son, Grimes, “is studying the issue because she said she is interested in a project of this style.”
“We are getting closer to Elon Musk and hopefully he gets more excited about this than about Dogecoin, which is nothing more than a meme. We have users in China, in all regions of the world and of course in Latin America in general and in Argentina in particular “
“We do not depend on the government and we went straight to people’s wallets and this was very emotional; so the first thing I did was convey that feeling that I couldn’t stop crying ”.
Siri recalled that he met the founder of Etherem in 2019, when they went together “to the Parliament of Canada to present ideas of digital democracy.”
“He’s a young boy, he listens more than he talks, he has a great sense of humor like any good nerd; He is the most influential person of his generation, who has not only displaced the strongest entrepreneurs in the United States, but also the model that emerged in Silicon Valley, because he is Canadian and the son of Russians. He is more interested in being an intellectual, a hacker, ”explained the Argentine entrepreneur.
Siri said that other figures in the crypto world could join in as happened with Vitálik. “Yes, because in the end it is all a matter of technology coordination. Hopefully what we are doing with the UBI is a universal income and all interested capitals coordinate with a token like this one ”.
The first step is the human identity identification system: a person shows their identity on the Blockchain and other humans can vote to validate whether they are a person or not through this proof of life.
If identity is verified effectively, the person will have access to Universal Basic Income (UBI), which has several advantages, because it accumulates in their electronic wallet in real time.
