The Challenge
When Devconnect confirmed Buenos Aires as its host city, the Ethereum Foundation's grant objectives set a clear target for reach. The obstacle was not logistics. It was reputation.
Blockchain had a credibility problem in Argentina at the time, and I think the industry underestimated how deep it ran. Public conversation about the sector was dominated by speculation and by episodes unrelated to the technology itself. That turned the most valuable audience into the hardest one to reach: universities, faculty, academic authorities and students. Institutions do not lend their credibility to a sector the public distrusts, and they are right not to.
Without them, a conference of that scale becomes a gathering of the already convinced. So I took on a narrower and more difficult mandate: connect with the country's education system and establish Ethereum's agenda inside it before the conference took place.
Strategy
I started from the grant objectives, not from a communications brief. The Foundation was funding education and access, so the work belonged where education and access actually operate: in classrooms and in the public system, not in the crypto conversation talking to itself.
I ran two fronts at once. The first was territorial: take the programme to the provinces instead of waiting for the provinces to travel to Buenos Aires. The second was institutional: pursue formal agreements with the state, on the premise that a signed agreement carries further than any campaign.
Execution
I proposed and ran a tour across ten provinces, executed through SEED Latam, delivering practical content: financial education, how nodes work, and programming. I insisted the material be useful rather than promotional. People can tell the difference immediately, and the useful version reached young people who could realistically attend the conference months later.
In parallel, I developed a collaboration agreement with the Ministry of Education of the City of Buenos Aires and the Ministry of Education of Salta, designed to bring secondary school students to the event.
Resistance was never the issue. Time was. Academic institutions and state agencies operate on calendars that do not bend to an event date, and I could not negotiate that away. So instead of approaching them one at a time, I opened conversations with several institutions simultaneously. Some advanced, others stalled, and the ones that advanced carried the result.
Results
- Roughly 5,000 of the 19,000 total attendees at the Buenos Aires edition arrived through this institutional and educational track.
- A programme delivered across ten provinces, covering financial education, nodes and programming.
- Formal collaboration agreements signed with two ministries of education.
- Five universities now run their own blockchain agenda, developing content and teaching programmes and courses on the industry.
The agreements are no longer active. The relationships behind them are, and every one of those institutional contacts remains open to me. That is the part that outlives a project.
Learnings
The binding constraint was reputational, not operational, and I would approach it the same way again. Sitting down with universities and academic authorities moved perception of the sector further than any campaign aimed at the general public could have.
The second lesson is about sequence. When you depend on institutional timelines, running conversations in parallel is not impatience. It is the only way a fixed event date survives calendars nobody controls.