The icon of the decentralised internet gave lectures at UTN and UBA, then travelled to Santiago del Estero to analyse the advantages of Blockchain with the governors of the Norte Grande region.
November 26th, 2025
Gavin Wood, author of the Ethereum code and founder of Polkadot
It was nearly 20:00 on Tuesday the 18th when, in the Assembly Hall of the UBA Faculty of Law, 400 students, academics and entrepreneurs witnessed a heated and rarely seen exchange: Gavin Wood, author of the Ethereum code and founder of Polkadot, persistently questioned Primavera de Filippi, a French lawyer specialising in Blockchain regulation, on how to determine the jurisdiction of a hypothetical event occurring on a Blockchain.
To the right of the audience, Juan Corvalán, Director of the Laboratory for Innovation and Artificial Intelligence (IALAB) at that institution, contextualised the debate: “I believe that, unlike Artificial Intelligence, one of the difficulties Blockchain faces when scaling is that its adoption is conditioned by these challenges (…) the user experience is not particularly good, and its incorporation into the social fabric may clash, perhaps, because it is a technology that was originally designed for money.”
This is merely a fragment of what unfolded between Monday and the following Friday.
Prior to this, the educational division of Polkadot had celebrated the signing of a framework agreement with the National Technological University (UTN), the crowning moment of which was a lecture in which Wood explained the new phase of Polkadot: JAM (Join-Accumulated Machine), a “universal supercomputer” in his own words, that adds a layer of technology allowing developers to deploy their solutions with greater agility.
Without going too deeply into software architecture, JAM was conceived as a structure that “will allow developers to use our platform in a similar fashion to how they currently use cloud services offered by large technology companies.” This means JAM will support all programming languages, whereas Polkadot has until now operated exclusively with Rust and Substrate, its native languages.
The technology layer Wood is adding to Polkadot causes the platform to begin operating much like a hard drive whose cores process information, except that this design is distributed across the network without sacrificing robustness or security. Wood himself explains that “we undertook this development because we understood that greater usability was needed in the decentralised network,” referring to simplifying the deployment of applications, service platforms and similar solutions for those seeking to build whilst preserving user privacy.
The Moment of Latin America
In conversation with Ámbito, Marina Marchesotti, Area Director of IALAB and Head of Business at Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA), highlighted Argentina’s positioning as a “global Blockchain hub” and offered a regional perspective.
“Gavin always insists on the fundamental importance of education in generating critical thinking. It is no coincidence that we came to UTN and UBA to tell more than a thousand young people what the technology of the future looks like, a technology already in use today, even if we are unaware of it,” she explained, noting that “almost every bank in the world has already recorded its assets on Blockchain, they simply do not say so (…) you open the application, use your money, and have no idea they themselves are securing the information using this technology. As an Argentine, it moves me deeply that we come here to tell young people from all over the country how, one day, they will be able to start businesses, be artists, use money, or do whatever they wish, without the intermediaries we currently contend with, precisely because this has not yet evolved (…) I believe that in Latin America, with the talent we possess and the need to innovate, the conditions are most favourable for us to make that leap.”
Journalist: This afternoon we saw 400 secondary school students participating and completely engaged by Lovisa Bjorna and Primavera de Filippi…
Marina Marchesotti: Takes a deep breath, smiles with glistening eyes. It is because they are showing us the way forward. Did you see that young man who raised his hand near the end of the talk and asked whether Blockchain could be used in elections to record votes? They do not carry that perspective of “Blockchain is crypto and it means being a hooded hacker hiding in a basement.” They are beginning to understand that there is another internet, another way of thinking about technology, a freer one. Obviously at 17, they carry far fewer prejudices and are far more willing to ask themselves why certain companies hold our data, why when a data centre goes down half the world’s platforms collapse.
J: On the other hand, tomorrow’s meeting is with politicians, and Wood repeatedly expressed his scepticism about the willingness of elected officials to innovate.
MM: That is true, but notice that it was they who invited him, and they will be presenting him with a formal recognition before the talk. I mean, even here, where there is a president with a case linked to cryptocurrencies, everyone has understood that Gavin Wood is thinking about the society of the future. He left Ethereum tired of speculation and created Polkadot. You interviewed him yourselves. He is a technologist who thinks about what the world needs in order to improve, and then sets about making it happen.
Reflections Looking to the Future
Along the corridors of the Forum Convention Centre in Santiago, spontaneous gatherings between entrepreneurs, academics and technology enthusiasts allowed one to overhear, for instance, proposals for sending money between South American countries using stablecoins in partnership with payment gateways; applications for sports fans offering rewards for their use; gamification of educational experiences; and projects to finance development in Central American countries through a token.
On this last point, Rodolfo Pou, a Dominican architect and director of the Diaspora and Development Foundation, a think tank researching development options for emerging countries through diaspora investment, remarked: “It has been most enlightening to be in Buenos Aires and meet one of the creators of this technology, which we are analysing as a means of providing a tool that would allow Dominicans abroad to invest directly in their country of origin.”
Now, the rapid rise of AI agents presents “a scenario of complete uncertainty,” according to Corvalán. In this context, marked by the enormous difficulty of distinguishing truth from falsehood, “Blockchain offers us cryptographic certainty, yet its adoption imposes challenges such as, for example, the need for a degree of regulation.”
On that point, researcher De Filippi emphasised, on Tuesday evening during her contributions at the UBA, that “just as in common law there exists the Rule of Law, in the digital world the Rule By Code ought to apply.” That is to say, if digital solutions run on Blockchain, no one can place themselves above the code, which is immutable.
Nevertheless, this technology, originally conceived to secure transactions involving digital assets, has resisted coupling with the structural norms of the democratic social order.
Before the governors of the Norte Grande, Wood reviewed prominent examples suggesting that establishing traditional governance structures on Blockchain would be a mistake. He cited the 2008 financial crisis, WikiLeaks, and Snowden as clear illustrations of the consequences of centralised information and traditional regulation by bureaucrats he described as “generally incompetent.”
At times, certain technological analyses prove challenging precisely because they operate at the frontier. “It is difficult to envisage from the present what will shape our future,” Marchesotti observed during one of her contributions. The caution with which we observe how technologies continue to surprise us seems well-founded, along with the understanding that societies adapt at a pace far swifter than the rules governing them.
Yet on the other side, the risk of harm resulting from unchecked advancement invariably puts us on the defensive. Wood insists that by decentralising information, we no longer require many of the authorities and structures that currently govern our lives, and that therefore we must be free and responsible. In his own words, more than subjects, we must be “agents.”
Perhaps there is a detail worth observing here. Technology does not function the same way across all societies. The company that created TikTok is Chinese, and in that country, the short-video platform is censored. In Europe, biometrics were regulated from the outset with a strong emphasis on user privacy, whilst in the United States their use is accepted with almost no restrictions.
The countries currently showing the greatest willingness to adopt Blockchain do not possess developed economies or strong democratic institutions. Taking cryptocurrencies as an indicator and setting the United States aside on account of its speculative tradition and the appeal of dollar-pegged stablecoins, the ranking by number of users shows India, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
Rules and institutions, especially the justice system, are most necessary where those in power are most likely to harm those who are weaker.
Just as in the Nordic countries technological innovation presents fewer risks of injustice, in nations such as those cited, globally accepted indices allow one to infer that when a technology as disruptive as Blockchain is adopted without clear authorities or rules of engagement, and as a means of technological and/or financial inclusion, the risk of deepening existing asymmetries grows.
Until now, Latin America has watched technological waves pass without ever being a protagonist. Whilst the current moment in Blockchain renews the hope of seizing the opportunity and leading the way, the region’s serious underlying problems demand that the sense of restraint be kept sharply in mind.
Source: Ambito.com